Ten: The Future is (Neoliberal) Female

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

If you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve probably heard the word “neoliberalism” before. Most of us only have a vague concept of what that means — I certainly did when I started this project. But to understand wellness entrepreneurship, we need to understand neoliberal economics — and neoliberal feminism — and how it shapes our ideas about who we are and how we’re meant to function in the world.

In this episode, we dive deep into the economic foundation of “self-worth” and discover how the value we place on our brands becomes the value we place on ourselves.

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 0:24

My name is Kyla Tova, and this is your body your brand. Episode 10. The future is neoliberal female.

Brenda Swann 0:41

You know, I, I do have some very, very, very dear friends in the realm of the health world that have been very successful what they're doing. And, and I have had conversations with them on, you know, how, how the fuck are you doing this because you know, in my mind, what they're doing and what they're actually doing two different things, of course. And I have been so fortunate that because we are friends, it they have made it very clear to me, like, this is what it's really like, and this is what I really do. And this is what it looks like here, that this is where it is. And in even though it's not super far removed, what they put out there. You know, it's almost like in my head as the aspiring person of success, I made it out to be like they were, you know, a Castle in the Sky with their herds of unicorns.

Kaila Tova 1:35

Where did we get our ideas of success? What does that Castle in the Sky or the herd of unicorns that Brenda Swan talks about look like as we present them to one another through our personal brands. We've touched on this in earlier episodes, but when it comes down to it, branding yourself in the wellness industry is all about commodification. Let's recall something writer Melissa Toler talked about in our first episode,

Melissa Toler 1:59

despite what people say about the health and wellness industry, it's really not about health or wellness, it is about selling stuff, to help you lose weight, and wellness is not directed it. It's only directed towards certain people, it's as if certain people you can't afford it, you look a certain way You don't deserve to be well, so it's, it's it's very, the whole community, to me, is very empty, and manipulative, and individualistic.

Kaila Tova 2:34

Weird, that empty, manipulative, individualistic ethos come from, well, and here, we have to get a little academic and a little political. So we'll try to keep this discussion as fun and interesting as we can without sacrificing the larger message. It all comes down to an economic philosophy called neoliberalism. It's a term that you may have been seeing and hearing used in the mainstream, maybe only fairly recently. But neoliberalism actually has been an undercurrent of most of our lives. Certainly my entire life, having been born towards the end of the reagan presidency, everything I learned about how the world works, and probably most of what you know about how the world works stems from the political and economic frameworks that came into being or at least began to fully manifest themselves. Around that time, I had the opportunity to speak with Katherine Rothenberg, a professor of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham and author of the rise of Neo liberal feminism, about what neoliberalism is and how it functions in our current cultural climate.

Catherine Rottenberg 3:37

And neoliberalism is a form of reason to, and it's a former reason that remakes everything in the image of the market. So this kind of reason encourages us to perceive ourselves through the lens of a calculated metrics to a market metrics. It encourages us to organize every social, political, and even affective emotional aspect of our lives, as though we were some kind of Excel spreadsheet. So what you have is, so what neoliberal neoliberalism does, ultimately, in terms of society, and the social fabric is that it reduces the value of people, it reduces the value of the earth, Earth's resources, and it reduces all other living things, two categories that are informed by the market like profitability, like dividends, and of course, value appreciation, this is what we're encouraged to do all the time, neoliberal rationality extend to specific formulation of economic values, and economic practices and economic metrics to every dimension of human life. And as a result, it helps transform us human beings into these kinds of entrepreneurial agents. So we come to think of ourselves as entrepreneurial, as little specks of capital, as constantly needing to be innovative and entrepreneurial, and all aspects of our life. And we're constantly encouraged to invest in ourselves in order to ensure that we remain competitive and valuable on the market. So that's why there is this focus on entrepreneur entrepreneurial ship, on corporate success, because neoliberalism is precisely about the reduction of everything. And again, even ourselves into a kind of financial eyes corporate model.

Kaila Tova 5:31

In other words, the reason it seems like a no brainer to consider ourselves not as people but as personal brands, is that Neil liberalism, the entire foundation of our current socio economic system considers us in terms of economics, you can't monetize a person, but you can monetize a brand, we're not able to function under this rationality as humans, so we interact instead is human capital, our language, the language of neoliberalism, makes a difference possible to frame ourselves in any other way. Now, it wasn't always like this, but things have been trending in that direction since the late 70s. And the rise of social media has only accelerated and heightened this rationality by giving us more tools for solidifying our belief in ourselves and our brands as capital. And this wouldn't be a problem necessarily, except for the fact that capitalism by its very nature is inherently unequal. It's about competition. And we don't all get a participation trophy, since we exist in a patriarchal society, which is also unequal, and it's apportioning of privilege and resources. When that's coupled with neoliberal capitalism, women, identifying people, and especially women, identifying people of color are really hurt by these systems. So when we look at the kinds of jobs that are prized in the capitalist system, like, say, becoming the CEO of your own business, we have to understand, first of all, what we're privileging by prising, that kind of role, and then why we're privileging it. In fact, if you're on the cusp of the Gen X millennial divide and XNEO or older, it may seem a little strange to you that becoming the CEO of your own business is something to prize it all. I was born in 1986. And no one when I was in school was fixated on online entrepreneurship or personal branding. No one had heard the phrase lean in women were still expected to have it all and be good solid workers in the corporate system will also building a home. But being a hashtag, lady boss really wasn't in the vocabulary. But then came social media, and then things started to change. Brooke, Aaron Duffy, the communications professor at Cornell, whom we met in an earlier episode noticed a similar shift and begin to question self branding is ultimate ability to achieve the goal of empowering women.

Brooke Erin Duffy 7:48

I finished my undergrad degree in 2002. And being an entrepreneur never came up in my classes, that was not anything my peers, especially to do. And now I mean, it's it's so pervasive that all students are encouraged to be entrepreneurs and be the CEO of you. And, you know, one thing that's important to keep in mind is, in a lot of ways I see. And I'm not the first argue this but but entrepreneurship is another term for independent worker or freelancer, because despite a lot of the benefits of working for yourself, and being your own boss, there are a lot of really significant problems in terms of you are shouldering the burden for training and employees and insurance and benefits. And you know, to essentially be your own boss means everything falls on you. And so it's an incredibly risky endeavor. So that's where we think that's where we see the way traditional markers of capital and class play out in terms of, you know, who can afford to be an entrepreneur and who can afford to kind of take the risk and go out on their own and launch their own startup venture. But agenda also plays such a significant role in that if we think of the the prototypical entrepreneur, especially in American culture, it's, it's a male business person, often a, you know, a white educated male. And so a lot of the traits that are associated with entrepreneurship, you know, including independence and risk and even the term bossiness. These are traditionally male, masculine traits. And so, you know, how does female entrepreneurship get translated into these contexts? And it's, as you said earlier, this kind of, you know, hashtag, Boss babe or or mompreneur? SO and all of these, you know, it's, it's rendered an inferior category of entrepreneurship. And I did a study with one of a graduate student at Temple or Sheila from Nazca. And we were really interested in, you know, what does digital entrepreneurship look like for a female creative worker? And so we did, in depth interviews with creative workers, across marketing, and media and content creation. And we were really struck by the the challenges that they had to negotiate by being female independent workers working in these highly masculine spaces where, you know, for instance, they had to think about well, is it okay if I share images of my children on on my professional Facebook site? Or, you know, how can I, we call it a kind of a soft sell promotion, so they couldn't do this sort of, in your face hard sell, because they were they feared that that would alienate their their consumers and their clients. And so what we found is that entrepreneurship was sort of filtered through this normative femininity prism, where these women face the additional demands, they had to negotiate, you know, what it takes to be an entrepreneur with these very traditional expectations of what it's like to be a woman working in the contemporary moment.

Kaila Tova 12:17

Yeah, you know, I was thinking this morning. You know, Gary van der Chuck. Yeah. So his whole model of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, it's the the vision of the male entrepreneur online tends to be pretty, like not violent, but physically assertive in the language of entrepreneurship. There's a whole category of people I call marketers marketing to marketers. Because that's the only way that you make money online is teaching other marketers how to make money. It's not really like you can make money selling health stuff, if you get in early two, whatever the trend is, but after that, the only way to make money is to sell to other marketers. But I was so interested, I was thinking about his whole Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook philosophy, and the idea that you give free stuff, get free stuff, get free stuff, and then take them by surprise and sell them sell to them, essentially. And I feel like for women, and again, this is, you know, it's incredibly, you know, a general statement. Obviously, there is this sense that, you know, we keep jabbing, but we're never really expected to give that right hook. It's just give your stuff away for free.

Brooke Erin Duffy 13:32

Yes, yeah, you're spot on on that. And as you were talking, I, of course, I'm thinking about the rise of all these multi level marketing companies where, again, you know, the, the owner at the top is a male, and there's, you know, so many women populating social media feeds with these, these various products that are kind of positioned as sort of like a marginal entrepreneurship, where, you know, you deploy traditionally feminine soft skills to promote among your friends and, you know, you engage in, you know, what we think of is emotional labor in, in these contexts. So, in all these cases, it's, it's rendered as an inferior category that gets compensated a lot less.

Kaila Tova 14:37

Giving your stuff away for free and getting compensated less. It's not just the violence that men perpetrate on women, it's the violence that women have learned to perpetrate on one another. Even as women encourage one another to become lady bosses and then find value in their bodies, they routinely undervalue the products and services of the women who do this work, if they can afford to pay the price is being asked and in the first place, Sarah Vance, the body image coach, whom we heard from several episodes ago, got frustrated with body image coaching, because at the end of the day, she was just giving away her expertise for free for the advice of Marie for Leo and other business coaches like her.

Sarah Vance 15:15

Well, I think it's interesting that in if we're specifically talking about body image, which really is, you know, a discussion about self worth, and the value of an individual, which it just really blows my mind that if that really is the base of that work, like seeing individuals value, especially when it comes to anybody who resides in our marginalized body. So women, people that identify as women, you know, I could just it doesn't, it becomes a very big clash with like, what's actually occurring, versus what the actual quote unquote movement or belief system is about. Because if we really want to advocate and say, yeah, you know, I'm valuable, and the rest of these individuals are valuable, then but people aren't living that like they're, they're not living that like the either not only the coaches, but also the people that are ingesting all of this stuff that are asking for it and, and not wanting to pay, it just doesn't, it's a very like, it causes a lot of friction when you sit down and critically think about that message. And what's actually occurring is that like, if that's what we want to say, if we want to know our own value, and we truly want to create a shift, when it's like, everybody has value, blah, blah, blah, then like we need to be we need we need to live up to that, like we need to walk that talk, we can't just talk it and then be like, I'm not going to pay anybody you know what I mean.

Kaila Tova 16:42

Yet for Brenda Swan, from whom we heard at the beginning of the episode, and whose story we've been following for several episodes. Now, the moral she takes away from her experience is not that she was at a disadvantage from the start, that the business model she was encouraged to follow. And the lifestyle she'd sought to build was exploitative, but that she had simply not done a better job of conforming to Neo liberal ideals, she had not framed her business, which is to say her body, her brand, in terms of measurable economic goals,

Brenda Swann 17:11

when you are a business person, as a business person, you in order for you to be successful, you have to understand the return on your investment. Right? And you need to understand, like, down to the nitty gritty, what that means for you. And, and I wish I would have taken that ideology to, to what I was actually doing, because then because all I was doing was investing, investing, investing, without knowing what my return was without understanding it. And on top of that, without acknowledging what I was actually getting a shitty marriage a better relationship with my mom fleecing my other business of all, its money, you know, no actual business plan of business or you know, whatever. No, actual, not nothing, like nothing, not realizing that like, oh, when I'm putting all this free content out there, no one wants to pay for it when I want to sell it. You know, and because I have nothing else to give because I've already given it all away.

Kaila Tova 18:13

We're being told to become entrepreneurs. But starting from a place of less privilege means that we're mostly becoming contractors, freelancers or other quote unquote, inferior categories of entrepreneurs, like say, Mom printers, which allows us to think that we're playing with the big boys when in reality, we end up being forced to play small and in many ways becoming a wellness entrepreneur is an extension of that enforcement. Brenda, previously a successful entrepreneur in her own right felt that she couldn't be successful until she monetized her body, in the end, doing so nearly ruined her. You'd think hearing so many women beat the quote unquote feminist drama and the selling of their own personal brands today that things wouldn't transpire this way, shouldn't feminism by its very nature solve the problem? Well, many of the original feminist theorists described this world view feminism should stand in opposition to this system of inequality. Many feminists also leaned Marxist in their worldviews searching for a more egalitarian and equitable economic and political system on which to base their critique of culture. But today, there's a new kind of feminism that is developed in response to the creep of neoliberal economic policy into our everyday lives. It has many names and manifests itself in different ways. But essentially, it's a bastardized form of feminism that is choose the basis of its economic and political philosophy to become something mainstream, relatable and valuable in today's economic terms. Neo liberal feminism and its sisters marketplace feminism as defined by what you buy, and popular feminism as defined by how you perform and brand your activism through your marketplace purchases has changed the way we identify with and enact feminism. When I was growing up, it was still unpopular to call yourself a feminist. But today, that's not the case. Since 2012, it's actually been very popular to call yourself a feminist. In fact, if you don't publicly identify as a feminist these days, you'll get blacklisted from Hollywood and shamed off of Twitter. And while that might seem like a win, the trouble is that the definition of feminism has warped and how we use and understand it today. Andi Zeisler, the co founder of bitch magazine, and author of we were feminist once watch that change happen throughout her career as a maker of feminist media.

Andi Zeisler 20:27

I've been working, you know, in feminism and with feminism and creating feminist media for more than 20 years. And in that 20 years, I have learned so much. And I feel like I have grown so much as a feminist as a thinker, as someone who, you know, grew up fairly privileged, and didn't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about the intersections that we acknowledge now most of time. And so it's been, it's been really interesting to me to see a word and a sort of social movement and a political movement, a set of values, that has been consistently maligned throughout my lifespan, suddenly be something that people really want to embrace. But not necessarily because of its political or social import more because it has this kind of nuclear coolness that is very much associated with what you can buy.

Kaila Tova 22:00

reason that this popular feminism has become so popular under a neoliberal framework is because it can be bought, it's a feminism that operates in marketplace terms, not one that rails against them, by conforming to the demands of neoliberalism. It's a feminism that is accessible, but not radical, it asks only that you change your purchasing habits or re examine how you evaluate yourself in terms of current market rates. But it does not ask you to truly try to change the system in a meaningful way. Sarah been a wiser head of the department of communications and professor at the London School of Economics has studied this very same trend.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 22:34

neoliberal capitalism is sort of the broad context that enables popular feminism to flourish in a particular kind of way. So the, you know, neoliberalism is sort of notoriously hard to define. And people have different understandings of it and different uses of it. But for me, in terms of thinking about feminism, there are a couple of, I guess, characteristics of neoliberalism that are important, I think, why is that it has a voracious appetite. It's always looking for new markets, right. So, you know, markets for the self brand markets for intimate relations, you know, monetizing intimate relations and so on. It is also about the individual. So it, you know, neoliberal capitalism addresses, people as consumers most of the time right as, and so it already has in a limitation built into collective social action, because it's about addressing people as individuals. And but the other thing about about neoliberalism, which, which again, Katherine's book is really enlightening about is that it also welcomes a particular version of feminism. So it's not anti feminist, right, but it is, it welcomes a version of feminism that is, that is about women becoming better economics subjects rather than better feminist subjects. So it's not anti feminism. It's just it's a particular version of feminism that is important.

Kaila Tova 24:12

This bears repeating Neo liberal feminism is about women becoming better economic subjects. So think about what people are talking about in popular feminism today, expanding the leadership pipeline for corporate management, getting women into STEM, empowerment, influence and self betterment all positioned as ways to get into higher paying jobs or even to monetize the domestic or care work you're already doing but not getting paid for. Here's Katherine Ruttenberg again.

Catherine Rottenberg 24:40

So basically, in a nutshell, the way that I understand in the way that I use Neo liberal feminism, it is as variant of feminism, and one that's emerged and become dominant on the Anglo American cultural landscape, basically, in the past decade or so. And of course, this is a feminism that is a hyper individualized one, it encourages individual women to organize their life in order to achieve a happy work family balance, and that's key to this discourses, neoliberal feminist discourse, the idea of work family balance, and, and it also encourages women to perceive themselves as Becks of human capital of encouraging them constantly to invest in themselves and to be empowered and to be confident. And if they're not, then it's of course, they only have themselves to blame. So my claim my work, what I claim is that this Neo liberal feminism helps to create a new kind of feminist subject and subjectivity. A subject who is incessantly encouraged to take on full responsibility for her own well being and self care. And maybe I should say that this feminist can and does. And here we can talk about Sheryl Sandberg acknowledge the gender wage gap and sexual harassment as signs of continued inequality. And this is what distinguishes it from what some call like Rosalind Guillen, Angela girl be sort of the post feminist sensibility, because there is this recognition of continued inequality. But the thing is, is that the solutions that Neo liberal feminism posits to these problems are individualized. So it's about encouraging individual women to speak out against sexual harassment and abuse. And what that then does is it aligns the structural undergirding of these phenomenon. So what this feminism ignores, of course, is the structural structural sexism, a systemic misogyny. And of course, in order to root out sexism in society, what we need to do is we need to profoundly transform institutions policies and cultural norms. So individual women being powered are speaking out simply doesn't cut it.

Kaila Tova 27:01

So essentially, feminism instead of helping us interrogate the economic and social structures that have undermined women's economic and social agency has adapted itself to mirror the structures that it originally set out to critique. Popular feminism is, in essence, not empowering, even though it uses the word empowerment in pretty nearly every part of speech, empowerment, to empower, I am empowered. Here's Andi Zeisler, again,

Andi Zeisler 27:28

success in a corporate world built by men for men, historically very uninhabitable, two women, individual women succeeding within those spaces, and encouraging other women to succeed within those spaces, but not doing anything to fundamentally change the way those spaces operate. That is about, you know, that's about individual empowerment, that's not about, you know, changing the system, so that more women and all kinds of women can thrive. That is a system that is still going to privilege. Women who become successful, you know, maybe 5% of the time, on the backs of other women on the backs of the women who, you know, are their nannies and their cooks, and their housekeepers. So that's essentially, you know, empowering individual women at the expense of the empowerment of many, many more women who do not have choices, do not have privileged and do not have, you know, the ability to enter, enter those, you know, existing spaces. And, you know, it's, it's interesting that I, to me, this was such an obvious thing, when people have talked about empowerment in the past and sort of talk about like, the idea that feminism has worked, because, you know, Pepsi has a female CEO, or Hewlett Packard has a female CEO or a woman can run for president. The idea that the sort of exceptional woman become synonymous with feminism is really faulty, because it, it isn't about it isn't about really thinking about liberation in a truly radical transformative way. It's thinking about, oh, you know, into individual women can do as well as individual men and make as much money and have as much power. Even if they do nothing different with that power. It's still feminism. And I guess I've always been disturbed by how few people publicly have really interrogated that until, you know, fairly recently.

Kaila Tova 29:59

What does it mean that we're not interrogating this imbalance? It means that women identifying people are increasingly turning to hashtag feminism to the marketplace to commodified themselves in lieu of political activism, to advocating for more women managers and leaders and CEOs. They're hoping to build the tech pipeline so that more individual women can get rich in an already lopsided system. They're becoming lady bosses and solar printers and calling their personal income a feminist victory. They're advocating for the visibility of female income, sometimes even perverting the idea of intersection ality to suggest that as long as we can see one person's individual gain, were somehow seeing economic empowerment for an entire group of people. In some ways, this is why social media is so alluring, because it plays into our desire for more representation and visibility, by giving us the means to make visible or to see represented our own personal path to economic gain. Sarah been a wiser, has developed an analytic called the economy of visibility to explain how this impulse external rest is itself. And in the liberal feminist framework,

Sarah Banet-Weiser 31:02

I developed this analytic called the economy of visibility in the book and and why I did that is because I am a feminist media theorist. And I've worked a lot and have been kind of politically engaged with what lots of people call the politics of visibility, where representation and visibility is seen as sort of a route to pop political change or social change. So we agitate for more representation, and better representation of trans people on TV, with the hopes that that will actually lead to something like tolerance or something, you know, but the, the actual representation and the visibility is, is a route to the politics. And, you know, in the last decade, with just the incredible increase and wide reach of digital media, especially social media, what I was noticing was that, actually, what we were seeing was that the visibility and representation sort of became an end in itself, and it stopped being a route to politics. So, you know, a T shirt that says, This is what a feminist looks like, became the politics itself. And, and I saw that, as being these these, you know, representations and these images of feminism, and other things, not just feminism as circulating in this economy, so fast that we can barely contemplate or, or, or digest any of these messages. And so it's, it's related to the platform and the platforms in which these images circulate, it's related to what people have called platform capitalism, where things like the attention economy is what we're interested in how many likes how many followers that that kind of obsession with metrics, rather than thinking about what these images and what these messages might actually mean, how to engage with them, one of the things that is characteristic of I think the contemporary capitalist climate is is about self entrepreneurship, and, and about recognizing your value as a human being in terms of your economic success. And that is, if you're in a context, where it's kind of ever increasing markets, right? And, and it's about sort of idea of meritocracy that your merit somehow will, you know, allow you to rise to the top. And by that I mean, be economically successful than a human beings worth is about their economic worth, you know, so, so this is, this is sort of the the, and, again, Catherine writes about this extensively, but this is sort of the the premise and, and this idea of lean in ideology, right, that you that women should just lead in more to, you know, operate in the business place in the workplace, as an economics subject, right. And it's so it doesn't challenge the logic of capitalism, or the logic of being an economic subject at all, it doesn't ask us to think about different alternatives for our words, such as care networks, or that kind of thing. Instead, it really it sort of reified this idea that if we are economically successful, then we have worth as human beings. And I think that within popular feminism that emerges or is manifest and a lot of the discourses about confidence that we see everywhere, right? So it's about telling yourself, I am confident I am, you know, I am beautiful, I am confident I can do this, you got this. And there's nothing wrong with like, aspirations like that, but But the problem is, is that by saying, just like Sarah, I am confident, it doesn't challenge or asked me to think about even the social and cultural and political conditions that make me feel less competent in the first place. Right? Because it is just about it has this kind of logic, this economic logic that is about being confident in the workplace. And so I think that, again, there's nothing wrong with with, you know, discourses of confidence, but when they focus on the individual, and thus make it the individual woman's problem, when she's not confident, then she's ashamed of herself, or she ashamed. And so it's that it's that, you know, kind of Manichean dynamic between shame and confidence that in order for you to be confident, you have to put yourself out there and when you put yourself out there, you are most likely in this in this climate today going to be shamed. And if you can endure, you know, then you've made it or something.

Kaila Tova 35:52

Yeah, which is

Sarah Banet-Weiser 35:53

really depressing. I'm sorry.

Kaila Tova 35:56

No, I mean, it is, but it's also it's almost running Oculus, right, in that sense. That, but somehow we've all bought into it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've been saying it, right. shaming is a form of self discipline, can you love your body in a culture that says you should hate it? What's so interesting for me as somebody in the health world, is watching the ways in which women reproduce the same types of discourses through their Instagram posts, specifically. So you'll look and this was a phenomenon that started a couple of years ago now. But it seems like every woman who wants to position herself as a health influencer, especially if that woman is thin, is white passing or light skinned, or, you know, has some kind of cultural capital to begin with, she'll post a picture a side by side picture of herself with her abs, and then a side by side with her hunched over. So there's a fat roll, right? There's this idea or like posting your book for an after photo? It's like, exactly, as you say, you know, one, only one one asks to be shamed, can they then become a digital identity? Right? We build our brands on the idea of and during this, this shame.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 37:14

Yeah, and on this idea of transformation, right. Which is also about self discipline, and you can see, like, the discourse and the logic of transformation everywhere, like and makeover shows, and, and, and, and beauty tutorials online, I mean, like, in the Instagram post post, exactly. Like you're saying, it's, it's that, you know, it's that we, we need to be confident enough to transform ourselves in order to not be shamed for who we are, you know, it's it's very, it's a very tricky dynamic that I think that gendered beings feel in some, to some degree, most everyone, you know, hmm.

Kaila Tova 38:01

Yeah, you know, it's funny, I don't know if we had talked about this before, but my very favorite Nike ad campaign, there's a woman on the back of a spin bike, and she's in the second row. And the whole thing is that, you know, she is thin, pretty, but somehow she's not Phantom pretty enough, you know, and she's sitting on the back of a spin bike. And she says that she is, you know, she's feeling a little bit less confident. And then all of a sudden, these two women with perfect, but sit in front of her,

Nike ad 38:32

there's a strategy to where you sit and spin class, the middle is always safe. Unless the middle is right behind a bunch of models, actresses, and we'll spend the whole class staring at their model, actress butts, which is weirdly motivating.

Kaila Tova 38:56

And essentially, the idea, you know, on the surface is you need to be motivated to be better, right? You need to be constantly working towards transformation, specifically through fitness or health or some kind of visible transformation, right. But I also saw a parallel there in the way that Nike positioned themselves as kind of teaching you how to be a good consumer as well. So asking for that visual cue of what to look like to show that you've transformed, right? I hate having to see women with perfect supermodel bodies, but at the same time, it's oddly motivating, like, I need Nike to be positioning these women in front of me so I can become them too. Right? Yeah,

Sarah Banet-Weiser 39:44

yeah. Yes. Yeah. That that's, that sounds sort of like a horrible. It reminds me to have of, you know, this this movie, I feel pretty with Amy Schumer. Right? Which, which, you know, has this idea that, you know, that she, she hits her head, and so becomes befuddled. And so think she's hot when she's clearly not, right. And, and, and at the end of it, you know, when, when she, she hits her head again, and she realizes that, you know, her body is, is she should love her body, no matter what the movie ends on her back and Soul Cycle. And, and so I just, I don't understand that logic that, you know, but but that I sometimes feel like that movie is like, part of my book without the critique, you know, you know, there's like this, this idea that, that we should, that we should always be transforming, and consumerism absolutely relies on that, right? I mean, we always have to transform and we need to feel badly about ourselves. Because otherwise, Why the hell would we spend all this money on these products? Because, you know, we need to feel badly. So that, you know, this is this sort of the way in which consumption is about kind of therapy, where buying products and other shit allows us to feel better, you know, ourselves is, is sort of the way it works. And so I see that same logic in in popular feminism.

Kaila Tova 41:15

Yeah. You know, you actually say that in the book, there's the idea that the business of the self must be approached with an entrepreneurial spirit. And that self help is itself a form of art. And retail is a form of therapy. Right? Like, we're, we are coming to this place where, as you say, you know, there, we've increasingly normalized life coaches and love coaches and all these transformational people, because we feel like there, we constantly have to be working, it is the business of the self, right? And in a lot of ways, people are now getting rewarded with some kind of capital, whether its financial or social, because of investing in the self in this way.

Sarah Banet-Weiser 41:57

Yeah, and I think I mean, there's, you know, people have written really wonderful stuff about this early Hochschild wrote a book called outs herself about the ways in which we, again, monetize our intimate relations and our intimate practices, from anything from love coaches, and dating coaches, to wedding planners and birthday planners and all the rest of it, we're kind of outsourcing all these relational of activities. But I also think that it's really important to make the point that, that while I think that this sort of therapeutic, what, you know, Jackson leaders cause a therapeutic ethos, why that affects, you know, not just women, it is almost always about women's bodies, that is source into sight of transformation. And so, you know, it's not about transforming necessarily her mind or something like that. It's about you know, it kind of revolves around her body and which is why sort of one of the things one of the sort of misogynistic responses to this emergence and, and more general embrace the popular feminism is often about the body rape threats, fat shaming, body shaming, revenge porn, you know, it's about, it's about this kind of controlling women in this way that is reducing them yet again, to their bodies. Mm hmm.

Kaila Tova 43:17

And it's just so interesting that instead of rebelling against that, in some ways, many women especially who follow that popular feminist ethos, choose to go the route of self discipline of controlling their bodies as well. You know,

Sarah Banet-Weiser 43:34

yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, it's, I think that that's not an, you know, an unusual response, if the way in which we are going to be valued is based on that, 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, you have rights, it's about valuing women, and 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 interests.

Kaila Tova 44:18

I want you to bookmark this sentiment, because we're going to pick back up here next time when we discuss self discipline and self interest in the name of self brand.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai