Eleven: Accountability

When we start a diet or a fitness program, we often ask others to hold us accountable.

When we launch a brand or start a business, we often feel accountable to our audience and customers.

What does all of that accountability mean, when we consider it in a neoliberal framework? In this episode, we look at economies of visibility and ask what whether becoming consumable objects via brand images is as feminist as we think it is.

Transcript

Sarah Vance 0:00

We still don't get paid what I believe we're worth

Tiana Dodson 0:03

I had secretly been wanting to try health coaching

Carrie Ingoglia 0:06

women have been dropping out.

Andi Zeisler 0:08

Your body is the next frontier of liberation.

Stefani Ruper 0:12

You have to monetize.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 0:13

We buy into this idea that anyone can do this

Victoria Ferriz 0:16

your body becomes proof

Kelly Diels 0:17

whether or not we're trying to sell a service or a product. All women are brands

Brenda Swann 0:21

now I'm a health coach.

Kaila Tova 0:25

My name is Kaila Tova. And this is your body your brand, Episode 11. accountability.

Bethanie Edwards 0:41

So, I guess I use my social media now two more to inspire my friends. But you know, it's just crazy because, you know, I moved on to this idea of being like, this is fitness brand. But now, you know, like, I just signed up for the most video Professor like to be a moniker that I could have on Instagram. And I'm like, What would I want to do with that? And it's interesting, I think, it says something about our culture, that people are just like, so how can I monetize their How can I make something that I do already and QI social media empire?

Kaila Tova 1:25

That's Bethanie Edwards, the science professor who we met in Episode Four. You may recall the Bethany ended up being diagnosed with an eating disorder after becoming a fitness competitor, and her obsession with following social media influencers led her to want to become a personal trainer and a social media influencer herself despite the fact that she already had a serious academic career. While her experience with monetizing her body may seem particularly extreme given the eating disorder, her story is a good jumping off point for today's podcast and the continuation of our conversation from our last episode about Neo liberal feminism, something Sarah Banet-Weiser said in our last episode is so important that I think we need to hear it again.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 2:05

You know, people want to be valued. I, you know, for me, feminism, the definition of feminism is about the value of women, right? It's not about equality. It's not based on some rights, you know, liberal ideology of rights, it's about valuing women in a particular kind of way. And so, so if we're valued in this in a way that is about our bodies, and it makes total sense, you know, that that people women would would engage in this self discipline that seems against their best interest,

Kaila Tova 2:37

right? The definition of feminism is about the value of women. But the way that women currently seek and gain value is through investment in the self, specifically in the body. As Catherine Rothenberg, the author of the rise of neoliberal feminism put it last time, the self brand is about reducing yourself to a number. It's about making yourself accountable, both accountable to your father, for maintaining the brand and upholding patriarchal norms of beauty, health and fertility, and accountable as in a financial entity, one that can be counted. your social media accounts are both and account of your authentic life and as a way to monetize a taxable entity, Bethany as an inspiration to her friends as a body based brand as a fitness competitor posting about her recovery journey online is the ideal example of what it means to be accountable. She uses her social media to give an account a story of her fitness and nutrition practices and of her recovery. She's also using social media to be held accountable for or beholden to, first, her fitness and nutrition practices, and then her eating disorder recovery. And finally, as a commodified entity as a brand. She is also accountable in the sense that her body and her presence online are monetary entities, and she can therefore be counted, taxed and monetized.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 3:55

The trouble with all of this is that the more you reduce yourself to a number, the more you're able to commodified, the very thing that feminists have been arguing against since the term was born. Women aren't objects and yet, under a neoliberal framework, we seem to unconsciously be treating ourselves as such, here, Sarah been a wiser again, when you think about something like a self brand, you know, what happens when you when you, when you're trying to create a brand of yourself right on social or digital media, one of the things that happens is that your worth is measured by the number of followers you have, or the number of likes that you have, or the number of retweets or, you know, again, this kind of metric capitalism, where where our bodies become the commodity where it is, we in fact, kind of become a certain kind of product that circulates in this media landscape. And so I think that there's a relationship between viable body and visibility, the more visibility you have, the more commodified, you can be, and visibility feeds on itself, it can never remain stagnant. Visibility just leads to more visibility, and then it becomes this cycle. And so that's, you know, that's kind of what I mean, there. It's not actually that the body is an actual commodity, but that we start thinking of ourselves in terms of brands and products and attention economy, then we stopped thinking of ourselves in terms of subjectivity.

Kaila Tova 5:37

When we lose our sense of self as subject, and instead begin thinking of ourselves in objectified terms, the more we invest in a certain identity and find that others are willing to invest in that identity as well. Well, it's easy to start fooling ourselves into thinking that the thing we're selling is the thing we actually are. And the irony of all of this is that the more we lose our sense of self as subjects, the more we have to seek our sense of self in the subjectivity of others, we have to look for examples of ways to be healthy, successful and empowered. And we find them online in the images of women who have already gained a following. I spoke with Dr. Rachel O'Neill, a graduate fellow at the London School of Economics, who's also doing research on wellness entrepreneurs, to try to understand what it is that makes the image of the successful female entrepreneur online so attractive,

Rachel O'Neill 6:26

in terms of the fact that they were in terms of the way that they initially drew their on their own followings, typically, through social media, through blogs, through YouTube channels through Instagram. I think that there was an appeal, of vitality of having a sense of enormous well being of having energy. And these kinds of promises of feeling really well, and one stuff that has a kind of intuitive appeal, in many ways. Not to be overly cynical about it. But I think one of the things that initially drew the mainstream media into reporting on these women and their, you know, their business doings was that they fit a particular media prototype. They are the specific cord I have in mind, are young, they're white, they're slim, and able bodied. And they're conventionally attractive. They're very beautiful young women. And there's a big appetite, I think, in the media for not just images of these kinds of women physically, but images of these kinds of women being successful being professionally successful. And I think that these women serve to the media narrative serve to kind of city at this desire for images of female success. I think this has been going on for quite a while. And I think that it is part of a way of grappling with continued inequality. So it is not good news in the sense of being a good news story to continually report on sexism and inequality in the workplace. And yet, we know that these stories needs to be reported on because at a factual level, these issues persist. And so I think the media has a way of offsetting this narrative of continued sexism, continued oppression, continued inequality, by really highlighting and for grounding images of female success. And in part, I think this, this happens as a way of, in the literature on post feminism, this has been described as a way of offsetting a renewed feminist energy. So as a way of kind of keeping feminism from coming to the fore, once again, from being a very active political movement. And I know you've already spoken to people who've written in on this area. And I think that the spotlighting of these particular wellness entrepreneurs fit within that broader and narrative, and yet at the same time, fed into ideas, of course of female empowerment and female success.

Kaila Tova 9:06

Yeah, you know, it's it's really interesting to me, having been kind of a part of this, you know, I first discovered wellness entrepreneurship in 2012. And that was basically when I started, which, you know, Katherine Rothenberg writes about the the rise of Neo liberal feminism kind of occurring around that same time. And I felt very, very strongly seeing these images of successful women online. having an effect on me, you know, I mean, I wanted to also contribute to that, you know, you mentioned it was kind of offsetting this renewed feminist energy, but at the same time, I felt I felt at the time, however, mistakenly, I might have felt it or you know, however, I might have felt it with a lack of intersection ality, I felt like I was doing something to prove that I could be a success, female.

Rachel O'Neill 10:01

No, I completely understand that. And I would say that some of the women I I've spoken to would see themselves as operating in a similar manner. And yet, at the same time, this is quite an individualized approach to female success and female empowerment, in the sense that one people are generally operating these businesses individually are very often operating these businesses individually. And while they may be participating in a wider network, and there is certainly a sense of community. At the same time, this largely remains a kind of a movement market, there are substantial commercial interests at stake here. Well, it's somewhat different, I suppose from thinking about feminism as a political movement. And and so if if feminism is is a political movement, then what we're seeing with the this kind of a movement, market and wellness is quite different because of the financial interests that are involved.

Kaila Tova 10:57

Okay, so let's tie this whole discussion about me neoliberalism back into wellness to episode one the aura, Boris, because I think it's very easy for us to get lost in the weeds simply talking about neoliberalism, which affects more than just this one aspect of our lives. When we see wellness as it's framed in 2019 terms, what we're seeing is not just the physical act of being in good health, it's an industry it's a self presentation. It's a brand. It's a way to signal your value in a society that increasingly commodified and charges for health, nutrition and fitness. At the same time, as we become a society that's increasingly invested in the idea of feminism, signaling that we're feminists while also profiting from distinctly anti feminist forces, like, say, Neo liberal capitalism, we increasingly need to conflate our other practices with feminism in order to maintain the veneer that our actions are indeed feminist. What I mean by that we want to believe and we want others to believe that our actions are feminist, so we just say hi am a feminist and therefore anything I do is by its definition, feminist. So, when we engage in practices that promote weight loss, obsessive fitness, fat phobia, orthorexia, etc, will also loudly proclaiming that we are feminists, we are allowed to profit from those practices, even if they are not objectively feminist. As long as our appearance is obscured the truth of the situation, we can get away with a lot under the guise of feminism or empowerment. rhetoric is that powerful. As we talked about in the last episode, feminism as a political movement has specifically been corrupted by the interference of neoliberalism. The commercial interests at stake and keeping women obsessed with their bodies are multi fold from purveyors of diet pills to makers of quote unquote, healthy foods, from gym franchises to fashion brands, from multi level marketing companies to health coaching programs. When we hone in on the forces that are driving us toward becoming an individual entrepreneur in this culture, becomes impossible to ignore the influence of the things that we see in here every day, especially in our always online world. And convincing us that dropping out of the workforce to peddle health and fitness is the cure to what ails us. And when we see and hear these messages cloaked as they are under the mantels of feminism and empowerment, it becomes very easy to buy into the idea that this is indeed the right path forward. So seeing lady bosses empowering lady bosses as they build their nutrition and fitness empires inspiring but not necessarily feminist. Let's jump back into my conversation with Sarah been a wiser, how then does that tie back into the the political idea of representation? Is it just that we've created this feedback loop where visibility leads to more visibility, but no actual change?

Sarah Banet-Weiser 13:48

It's not just that, I think that it has the potential to be just that. And so I also approach, you know, kind of popular feminism in particular with with a sort of ambivalent position, because I think it's really, really important that we that we are seeing so many more messages and images of feminism that feminism is being embraced in a popular way. And that happens because of accessibility and because of the economy of visibility, right. So. So I think that it's important, it's important that we have this this circulation of feminist messages, but we also have to think about what that kind of circulation excludes what other feminism's don't kind of, are not able to move into the spotlight, what, you know, how how the politics then become, you know, again, have the potential to just be in a feedback loop, you know, loop rather than resulting in some kind of social change. And I think that the ways in which, you know, there's been a kind of retaliation or reaction to things like reproductive rights in the United States and, and, you know, just general online massage, and again, all this stuff is is part of that feedback loop, right? It just, you know, kind of prevents feminism from actually resulting in some in social change, at least some of the time.

Kaila Tova 15:15

Part of why we're stuck in this feedback loop. Why we're stymied from creating real social change change that might prevent people from feeling like they need to drop out of the workforce and become entrepreneurs in order to be happy with their lives, is because we have been led to believe that individual financial empowerment is the route to happiness. And as we learned in Episode One, we've also been led to believe that dieting and fitness are prerequisites for happiness. And to tie it all together. We've heard through the stories of the women who have spoken on this podcast that dieting and fitness are also seen as pathways towards individual financial empowerment. As Catherine Ruttenberg and I discussed in our interview, happiness is a crucial influence on neoliberal feminist culture. Catherine draws her analysis from other scholars like Lynn Siegel, Sarah Ahmed, notions of happiness function in society as a promise that directs people, subjects towards certain objects, certain goals, certain behaviors,

Catherine Rottenberg 16:15

that are considered necessary ingredients for the good life, according to that culture.

Kaila Tova 16:19

And in our society, as we've just discussed, these objects, goals and ingredients for the good life are based around fitness, nutrition, and a certain presentation of the body and one's wellness.

Catherine Rottenberg 16:30

So it's not coincidental that under neoliberalism, people think that happiness comes from enterprise, right. So that's precisely what is now considered part and parcel of the good life, a successful business. And if you're also helping people, that certainly is an added good. But I also think that thinking about life coaches, or even, you know, women who are a stay at home moms, but try and create businesses from home. That, in a sense, there are only winners and losers, and what's some, you know, would call the Neo liberal competition, and it's only through smart investment, that you become a winner. And I think that's also a really important point in terms of the way that we understand why certain starting One's Own Business becomes a real pole for many, many people. Because it's both entrepreneurial, it's a way of becoming sort of a winner in this competition, being self reflective about these terms is really important. If the promise of happiness, if happiness operates as a kind of means of directing people's hopes and desires, through emotional effective routes, then we have to be self effective about where certain kinds of promises are leading us. And also, of course, who doesn't want to be happy, right? So I would also add, you know, only a half facetiously, who doesn't want to be balanced to live a balanced life.

Kaila Tova 17:58

But what is a balanced life under neoliberal capitalism? What is a balanced life when balance is portrayed as taking your health practices to the extreme? What is health when your entire life centers on the pursuit of the hustle,

Catherine Rottenberg 18:10

these notions are presented as really, really desirable, but of course, they do orient us in particular directions, and they help shape what we want. But on the other hand, and here's going back, can we talk about the pursuit of happiness, I don't want to dismiss happiness as simply a means of control. And here I want to draw again on the work of Lynn Siegel. And she has an amazing new book on happiness, where she argues that it's called radical happiness. She argues that happiness needs to be reconceived as an activity and not a static emotional state. And so what she doesn't her book, radical happiness is that she argues for radical happiness, and not, which is, which is basically collective resistant to oppression, in its various forms, with a shared sense of agency, for her that symbolizes the very essence of radical happiness. And so she is promoting this, this idea of radical happiness and not the pursuit of individual happiness, which hasn't done much for many of us.

Kaila Tova 19:18

Yeah, so busy

Catherine Rottenberg 19:21

it's kept us busy, yes, and kept us pretty miserable, too. So what she I mean, what she claims and I tend to agree with her is that these moments of collective agency are working together towards some common gold. While they're often fleeting, they don't last, they make us feel more alive, and hence happier, you were talking about the community within that burlesque dancing. And I think those kinds of communities are really important. I'm not sure even that you need to have broad political aims or objectives, but it's about working together on some project, particularly when these projects help us connect and express concern for the others. And I think that that, for me, is a way that we can continue creating hope. And of course, as we said, before, the pursuit of individual happiness has proven to itself pretty hollow. All we need to do is look around look around us and you know, who's, who do we see that's really happy in some sort of bizarre, you know, way. We have mental health crisis, we have grotesque levels of inequality, we have environmental catastrophe. I mean, so yes, I think we should be talking about the pursuit of happiness, but of radical happiness, not

Kaila Tova 20:34

individual happiness. And of course, but it's hard, because as exactly as you said, when we're looking around, what do we see? And what we see is people who are performing this version of middle class happiness, balance, stability, whatever it is you want to call it. And so we're just trying to replicate what we see, because that's the vocabulary we have. And it's it's difficult because, of course, with the language of platforms like Instagram, especially, it's the whole the whole way that you gain capital, right? Social, financial, any kind of capital is by performing the highest standard of that same thing that you've already seen. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. I

Catherine Rottenberg 21:22

mean, that's, I mean, I think it's about it's getting likes, it's getting people to, yeah, it does make sense, it makes a lot of sense. And I mean, the tragedy is that you have to get out of Silicon Valley,

Kaila Tova 21:39

but the ethos of Silicon Valley and to be honest, the ethos of Wall Street to is spreading, we can try to outrun it, but the internet and globalization has helped it to spread and it is contagious.

Catherine Rottenberg 21:50

Let's take the theory aside, I think that it is it is easier to turn inward and focus on the self self, especially if one has the economic and culture resources to do that, than it is to go out into what is becoming an increasingly frightening reality. I mean, and so and fight for transformative structural change. I think that many people I mean, we see this in the mental health crisis, we see this in all kinds of ways. It feel very isolated, and they feel that they have less and less power to change

Kaila Tova 22:24

society. So we change ourselves. And the way that our culture has been structured is to reward only those who appear to be engaged in self discipline. It's this self discipline reframed his entrepreneurial spirit. This cage with the bars labeled freedom is paste Smith put it that forms the basis of my concern about health coaching, personal training and other body based businesses. For years, dieting and over exercise has been framed as what we owe to ourselves. Most cultural critics will focus on the why fat phobia shame prejudice, American Puritanism, but I'd like to shift the company slightly and look at the word OO is an economic word to Oh is to be in debt to be owed is to stand to gain. And we believe that we are constantly in debt, we owe it to ourselves to go on yet another diet or start yet another exercise program. Just as we are experiencing the ill effects of neoliberal capitalism on our global economic financial system, and of Neo liberal feminism on our individual emotional states, I believe we're also experiencing the ill effects of neoliberal wellness. The belief that health is an individual endeavor whose effects can be purchased and whose recipients are determined by the market. Neil liberal wellness is an active consumption, you must be constantly seeking new highs, new prs, personal records, new modalities, you can't stagnate or you get left behind. Quality is not enough. Try hot yoga, hot yoga, no longer trendy, why not put polities in a hot room that not enough to differentiate your personal brand. Why not add a new piece of fitness equipment and call it a new style of exercise? Oh, but you don't have the latest gear. Don't worry, you can buy it. I hear Amazon will ship it in two days, just enough time for the trends to shift and a new form of fitness with new equipment and a higher price point to come around. And it's the same thing with diet. When I was part of the Paleo Nutrition community, I watched as people went from debating whether or not potatoes were safe to eat to doing increasingly restrictive, inexpensive detoxes to literally trying to tamper with their genetics. I've watched former friends and acquaintances try to optimize themselves into perfection only to develop extreme anxiety and depression which, of course, they tried to optimize away with micro toxin free coffee and diet, tenacious Earth. None of this comes cheap, which means that you have to make money in order to keep up with the never ending chase for increasingly more rigorous and stringent health and exercise trends. For increasingly more rigorous and stringent health and exercise trends. What you owe to yourself is often enough to put you into action financial debt. I've also noticed a subtle shift in the language around wellness and starting this podcast a few years ago. For a long time, it was all about how you owe it to yourself to partake in wellness culture. Now it's also about how you are owed health and time for self care because of all the sacrifices that you make in order to participate in Neo liberal capitalist culture. With the rise of Neo liberal feminism, the injunction to lean into corporate america while also somehow maintaining your looks your household, your children, if you have them. There's been a parallel rise in the idea that you as an individual woman are owed health because you are personally hustling as hard as you can. It's infiltrated our discourse. For example, here's some ad copy written by the fitness company peloton as read by john fat row and john love it on an episode of pod save America from September 14 2018.

Pod Save America Ad 25:54

But in America is brought to you by peloton. Even with a busy schedule working all day and running around for others, you can still get an intense workout in the convenience and comfort of your living room running around for others. It's like, all right, maybe put down the cross and get on the bike. You know,

Kaila Tova 26:08

the idea is that instead of rest, you are owed time to participate in our most performative form of consumer culture. But how do you get what you're owed, if you're not making enough money in your job, or your job doesn't give you enough time to participate in one this culture? Well, you drop out, and you ask others who have the means to do so to pay you. Here's Catherine Rottenberg again,

Catherine Rottenberg 26:47

the body is one of the sites that we still feel that we have could we have control over. So when everything else it feels totally out of our control, the body becomes a sight of where we can manipulate it in ways that we think is is is asserting a certain kind of control. So and I'll get back to that, I think I'll get back to that in a second. I think that if it's true that a liberalism individualize us and make and remakes, human beings in the image of capital, right, we invest in ourselves in order to maintain our value on the market, the body is then one of the sites of investment, and it is actually the most visible aspect of ourselves. And so not only is it the way that we project our, our success to the world, it's also the way that we ourselves can more easily see the fruit of our investment, so to speak. So, it becomes a very sort of visible manifestation of these individual investments. And of course, the ideals are very, very specific or very particular. And again, the other aspect, I think of why the body the obsession with the body and the fitness and again, comes back to this fact the fact that we the if the world is as out of control as I think it feels, then it makes sense in a sense to turn inward and try to control what we feel what we can you know, and that's our corporeal our existence, our bodily existence, we can control how much we work out, we can control whether we smoke or not, we can control or at least we we we think we can so the illusion of control.

Kaila Tova 28:28

Recall Bethanie Edwards from earlier in this episode, Bethanie felt that the only way to be valued was to get paid for her body. Even working on her PhD, she became obsessed with the idea of hustling for success, and showing that work on her body.

Bethanie Edwards 28:42

I want to keep this piece of the and training people and building a business and showing other people how to get this is how I do it. And so I like invested so much money I became I got certified personal trainer. I was like working in the gym the whole time. I'm like working on my PhD. Up and I'm thinking I might be able to build, you know, this like side business. And yes, I like the millennial. I guess mindset around money, right is like we all must hustle. And so I like thought that this is like the way out. And in the end, like I ended up getting a job at a gym. I was making like $25 an hour maybe. But I was only getting like, three or four clients a week great. And I was new, my personal relationships are crumbling of hungry all the time. I was like, food obsessed. I like started tracking macros. And like thought that that was the way you know, after like all this orthorexia. And that just made everything worse.

Kaila Tova 29:46

We do this because it's what we see, especially here in America, we have the belief that hustle leads to happiness. And at the same time, we believe that self care is essential for happiness. But self care and hustle are in most cases, at least the way that we practice them today, mutually exclusive. The hustle is about grinding past your limits. Self Care is about setting firm boundaries. Yet, somehow we've managed to conflate the two. And the way we've managed to do that is to redirect the conversation to focus instead on this idea of earning happiness, earning another economic word. And how do you get what you earn in a capitalist society? Well, you have to take it from someone else. Here's more of my conversation with Rachel O'Neill. That's I think the problem with all of this right is, so I guess there's there's a lack of awareness about how neoliberalism has so infiltrated our own our own awareness, I guess, or our lack of awareness, I don't know. It is. So infiltrated the kind of the the way that we just exchange basic social currency at this point, that we don't even know how to motivate ourselves without profit. And in many cases, we can't, you know, even a well off middle class white person still is in a position where if they say, Oh, no, I'm just going to volunteer my time, or I'm going to build a collective or then they, they themselves will not be well off very soon, you know, at least the way I'm living in Silicon Valley. So you know, any any hour that is not spent hustling is an hour that you've lost in terms of paying rent, so but so one of the things that's so interesting to me specifically about the idea of care, is that, you know, so when I wanted to become a first I wanted to become a personal trainer, then I became a health coach. I did believe that the stuff I was doing would help people, specifically, the kind of health coaching that I wanted to do was to help women in eating disorder recovery, so working with their therapist, or if their posts recovery, to help keep them on track and kind of develop that next sense of self for the rest of their lives. But if I didn't get paid for it, then I couldn't do that work, because then I couldn't leave my job. But if I did ask for pay, then I could only help a very certain subset of people, I guess, like a very specific subset of people who could afford it and who would pay? And those are the people who didn't necessarily need as much help as the people I wanted to help, if that makes sense.

Rachel O'Neill 32:34

Absolutely.

Kaila Tova 32:35

And so it kills me because I feel like there are so many women who are in care jobs, who are I guess they are kind of swayed into coaching into therapy away from therapy away from nursing away from teaching, etc. Because there is the promise of a profit and the ability to continue to care. Yeah, I have a therapist, actually, that I had been working with, in terms of helping her with marketing copy. And she recently messaged me and was like, hey, people have been asking for coaching. So I need to put that on my website now. Like, wait a second, you're a therapist. You don't need to be a coach.

Rachel O'Neill 33:20

Yes, yeah. Well, this is interesting. I think for me, there are two issues entwined with what you you've just been describing. So we have the material realities, people need to be able to make a living. Absolutely. And yet at the same time, this it seems as though for most women who are starting businesses in the this area, the only way that they can envision doing it is in very individual terms. As I said, this is about setting up individual endeavors working for oneself being a sole trader. And it's not about for example, setting up a collective not for profit, which would be aware of potentially making a living and but it wouldn't be about that ultimate profit motive. And so I think this ties in then to the ideological situation, we find ourselves in which in the UK, at least, the shorthand that we use for this is Tina, there is no alternative, the idea that there's no alternative capitalism, this is the only way that we can possibly organize society, this is the only way we can organize our economic and political system. And therefore anything that is within the bank without that is beyond the bounds of this model, is almost unintelligible people don't necessarily think of it. But what you're describing, it would be perfectly possible for people who want to work with women who are overcoming eating disorders, for example, to operate as a non as a not for profit. And yet, that doesn't seem to be at least among the women that I've spoken to that just didn't come up. It wasn't really on the horizon, the only way of operating was to set up as a sole trader to become commercially viable by having a certain profit margin. Hmm.

Kaila Tova 35:05

Yeah. Well, and, you know, I can say, for, you know, my own personal experience, I never would have thought of that, you know, because I think part of it too, is this idea of branding, right? You know, the idea of owning the the material of being able to say, Oh, well, I came up with this patented thing, which isn't really patented, but I put it on my website. So it's mine, and you can't take it and don't use my hashtag, or I'll come after you. You know, and because it's mine, I can't, I can only give it to you, if you pay me. Right, I have earned the right to say, you know, so for example, my whole brand was discovering not recovery. So the idea was, I was teaching women how to stop living their lives as if their entire life was recovery, right? You know, you move on to the next step, and you discover what else there is in your life, besides the looking at pictures of food and posting how much you ate that day. And so, and I would get angry or or affronted if I saw people using that hashtag on their Instagram, because they were also trying to become coaches, or, you know, it was this feeling of like, this is mine. And my brand is me. So if you do that you're taking away, you know, and I am the soul, you know, I'm the ability to earn capital, my brand is my social capital, it's my financial capital. And if you take that brand away from me, then I can't get more. So I guess, yeah, there is no alternative to capitalism, right. But if I give that to everybody, and I say there is more to life after recovery, there is discovery, there are things that you can do that aren't focused on your body. And I just give that to people. That's helping a lot more people. It's just Okay, so what do you do with that? Right? What do I then do in order to make money? Hmm. You know, and I think that's in that mode of, of there is no alternative to capitalism. That's kind of how we think about it. Mm hmm. Yeah,

Rachel O'Neill 37:10

no, absolutely. And I mean, I think on the issue of branding, I think that in many ways, this is actually caught up. This kind of branding logic, which people are applying not only to their businesses, but really to themselves, is really very much caught up with the kind of media through which wellness as a kind of a movement market has been formed. So I'm thinking here, particularly of of Instagram, and the kind of visual branding that people create, when they they have a profile, they have a page, and you have a clear aesthetic, you have certain kind of lines that you continually reiterate. And there's a clear branding logic on these kinds of platforms. But what's ironic, then, in relation to what you said, about people being quite possessive of the brands that they develop, that in coming up through something like Instagram, you don't own your material, you have actually already at the point of posting signed over all of the images, everything that you post on Instagram is owned by the platform. So what's interesting here is that you have this dynamic whereby individual women are placed in a situation where they cannot really, or don't, can't conceive of really collaborating with one another because they are so much placed in competition with one another. Meanwhile, capital is ultimately flowing upwards to these platforms. Right, right.

Kaila Tova 38:37

Yeah, it's it's funny, isn't it? But the messaging around it makes it seem like it's the other way around.

Rachel O'Neill 38:46

Hmm, absolutely. We have this idea that social media has a democratizing force. And that particularly, I think, particularly Instagram is not so much framed in terms of democratizing the country connection logic that we see with Facebook, but really, with entrepreneurship, at least in the context of the research I've been doing. And yet, it creates a very questionable business. I mean, certainly just in terms of copyright for people's businesses, it creates it quite a questionable Foundation, because you don't own anything that you've posted there.

Kaila Tova 39:21

Right. Right. That's I mean, that's so it's so interesting, because they nobody talks about that, at all.

This individualistic ethos, this self centered in the literal sense, self centered business building is very much modeled on the existing patriarchal capitalist system. In a way, it's a perpetuation of misogyny, this monetize self care. What I mean by this is by willingly participating in an economic system that asks women identifying people to value their bodies above all other potential contributions, to withhold help from people who cannot pay. And to become human capital, a brand that is dedicated to maintaining the system to hustling because they feel owed, they are perpetuating the same sort of anti woman misogynistic behavior and mindset that has kept women from being valued in our society in the first place. Sarah been a wiser recently wrote a book about women in the sadhana called empowered. And I asked her about it during one of our conversations. So I'm actually interested a little bit in following that thread about misogyny in a way, but in how it ties into the way that women themselves govern themselves and each other, and kind of how this ties into the neoliberal ethos. So, you know, in one of the chapters, you talk about pickup artists, and I found really interesting, quote, and what she said, the route to self confidence is to treat women like objects. But like other neoliberal practices, the focus is on the self, while the violence that underpins that focus is obscured as violence and is instead transfigured into self confidence. Right? So what I, what I got from that, from that whole section, in context, at least, is also kind of how women who become health coaches or who go into multi level marketing, or who take on these things in which they feel themselves develop worth, they feel themselves, they feel that they are investing in their own self confidence. They don't see it as exploitation or violence against other women who are primarily the people who buy from them. Right? They instead see that as a form of self empowerment. So for example, when you confront somebody who's in a multi level marketing company, and say, you know, what you're doing is exploited. And they say, No, if somebody you know, if somebody doesn't do well, that's not my fault. That's their fault. I, you know, yes, I got them into the company, yes, they lost all their money, but that's their own fault. What I'm doing is building myself this network of amazing women and getting all kinds of accolades, and whatever for, you know, the percentage of essential oils I sold, or whatever, right, or like, or like health coaches who can charge, you know, $1,000 a session, and, you know, women like myself, who then go, Well, I have to be working with a coach because I need to transform as well, we'll invest their life savings into something that ultimately turns out to be empty. But, again, it's not about the violence that was perpetrated against another woman taking away her economic ability, right, based on this really messed up logic. But rather than saying no, but I'm building an empowering business. And as an entrepreneur, this isn't about who I hurt. This is about how I gain merit how I gain worth.

Rachel O'Neill 43:02

Right.

Kaila Tova 43:04

Yeah, so I just I found that really interesting. Yeah,

Sarah Banet-Weiser 43:06

I think that I mean, I think that there's a lot there. I mean, I think that that this idea of building self confidence, and the way that that, that it's kind of being understood and and and and expressed in this neoliberal context, is, is not just about the self, it's about the self and relationship to others. Right? So it is it is this, you know, it, we know that capitalism is by definition competitive. And so to then become a self entrepreneur means that things like self confidence or competence itself, it becomes a kind of commodity that is exchanged, like in a marketplace. So the chapter on pickup artists, one of the things about that is that there's this idea that, when I say that it's not about now, necessarily treating women as objects, pickup artists recognize that women have sexual agency, right. And that's the problem, because they have agency, so they're not sleeping with these guys, you know, so, so so it is it is about, you know, kind of chipping away at that self confidence, because it because the competence that women acquire is seem to be at the expense of men's competence, as if it's a zero sum game as if there's, it's just there's a scarcity of confidence, right. But in a competitive environment there is, that's, you know, that's the kind of, that's just the way that it's been, this is not a new thing. Really, it's just taken to new heights, I think with digital and social media, you know, my first book was on on the Miss America Pageant and, and one of the things that I found so interesting about pageants when I started really researching them, because I didn't know very much about them. Is this kind of blue, like deep believe that, that contestants would say, it doesn't matter who wins? We're all winners. And I'm like, you're in a fucking contest? Of course. You know, I mean, you know, so so the but there's this belief, you know, because that, that that self confidence, we can all be self confident, but it almost always, at least in this context, at work, you and I are talking about it. It is about it's at the expense of someone else's confidence.

Kaila Tova 45:40

Here's Catherine Rottenberg again,

Catherine Rottenberg 45:42

there are different ways of thinking about harm, which is you can doing being complicit in a system, we have no choice, right? So we're always complicit. It's not when there's never there's no way of sort of extracting ourselves from neoliberal rationality, the question is, how, in what, in what ways can we challenge it, not only on a personal level, and I think some of the health coaches on a personal level, right, are helping people. And we can't dismiss that we it's not, it's not. But it's also at the same time, enabling a rationale and rationality that is destroying the world and everything in it. So I think that, though, we have to be able to sort of keep those two different perspectives or together on some level, so yeah,

Kaila Tova 46:42

no, exactly. And that I mean, and that is that is kind of that that central tension of of what's going on here in this in this particular, I guess, study, informal study that I'm doing, you know, because, yeah, people are being helped, you know, and this is actually why I got out of doing recovery work, I was a recovery coach for several years. And, you know, part of it to me was, you know, individually, I am able to help women who can afford to pay me money, right. But at the same time, I was, you know, by keeping my the stuff that I had discovered about recovery, about making it stick about finding, you know, therapy that works, all of these things, I was keeping that away from other people so that I could make more money, it just didn't see it, you know, yeah. And

Catherine Rottenberg 47:39

I think there's, there's also a sense of the helping the individual is, is also like putting a bandaid on a Festering Wound, and the wound is not the Festering Wound is ultimately going to, you know, destroy all of us. So Exactly. It's so

Kaila Tova 47:57

terrifying, essential It is, it is

Catherine Rottenberg 47:59

the world terrifying at the moment,

Kaila Tova 48:02

the world is terrifying. And as we discussed in previous episodes, when the world feels out of control, you look for the things that you can control, one of which is your body, we as individuals often feel like we have no outlet for creating actual global change. So we focus on our bodies, our health, our individual financial situations, our online visibility, because at least it feels like we're doing something, we want to be accountable only so far as it doesn't push us outside of the comfort zone of neoliberalism. Here's Andi Zeisler from bitch magazine, again,

Andi Zeisler 48:35

we live and you know, an increasingly not just a NEO liberal culture, where there's this idea of sort of, you know, privatization, the market will fix everything independent. You know, you can you don't need the government. It's a meritocracy. But it's really not a meritocracy. There's a whole idea that like, you know, there's a, there's some sort of weakness in relying on any sort of communal approach, whether it's education, whether it's the politics, whether it's to, you know, jobs and money, you know, under neoliberal, much more of a mean spirited society, where it's not just that people who make a lot of money or unwilling to spread that money around to the people who most need it. But we're a society that believes that they don't deserve it. And that the people who are able to make the most money, somehow are intrinsically more deserving, and thus have no, you know, accountability or responsibility to their, their fellow humans. And so yeah, I mean, you know, again, it's sort of like I see where capitalism can be incredibly useful in terms of impact, empowering, offering resources to communities and groups, andnorganizations that need it. But I think we fundamentally have to change the way we think about social responsibility.

Kaila Tova 50:13

When we think of social responsibility these days, we think of it on individual terms, I can't change the world, but I can help some women feel better about their own bodies, I can start a blog that helps other women lose weight, or get their periods back or grow stronger and more empowered, I can be accountable to my squad, or build a community of like minded women who want to grow and change together, I can't change the world, but I can have an impact in this small way. And our neoliberal culture reinforces and encourages that belief. Here's Catherine rotten Berg one more time,

Catherine Rottenberg 50:47

what I've come over the years to conclude, you know, is that neoliberalism may actually need feminism and in order to solve one of the things internal tensions in relation to gender, so I, you know, in the book, it's a very theoretical explanation. But here, what I'll say is that, near liberalism, as I, as I was talking about before, is all about market metrics, there is no outside to market metrics. Within a NEO liberal rationality, everything is reduced our political imagination, our intimate aspect of life, private sphere. So neoliberalism has no vocabulary, except financial ones, except market ones with which to address questions of reproduction and care work, or invite you know, or environmental disaster for that matter, but someone does need to do the care work. And neoliberalism does need human capital to sustain itself. So one, one of my claims, is that Neo liberal feminism emerges precisely to ensure that a discourse of child rearing of reproduction continues to circulate as part of public common sense. So one of the things that neoliberal feminism as sort of, at least it was dominant for particular period of time does is that it encourages women to desire children, this happy work family balance means that women are encouraged and in some sense, compelled to want fulfilling career as well as a satisfying home life. So you have a so on the one hand, you have this sort of norm, that's helping to shape women's desires. But of course, at the same time, you need a liberal feminism as a dis discursive formation helps devolve any responsibility for reproduction and care work on to the shoulders of individual women. So it helps the state to dissolve any kind of responsibility for care work or for reproduction. By creating this individualized discourse, so it helps absolve the state in the community and even an often even partners from any responsibility for care work. So that basically is how I understand the house and the wise. And by maintaining reproduction as part of middle class, or what I would call aspirational women's sort of normative trajectory. This is what you know, having it all means and positing balance as its normative ideal for ultimate ideal Neo liberal feminism does ensures that all responsibility for these forms of labor, of course, not necessarily all the labor itself, so it's often outsource to other less privileged women, falls squarely on the shoulder of these so called aspirational women.

Kaila Tova 53:59

And so in our next episode, the last episode of the series, we're going to talk about the real elephant in the room. Why we want to be accountable in every sense of the word for caring about other people's bodies and health so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Kaila PrinsJuly 7, 2021