I wrote one of my personal favorite blogposts ever a few weeks ago, about Levinson and Tesfaye's The Idol. And because the world loves to prove all my thoughts obsolete the second I express them in a semi-coherent way, since then, I've watched Barbie take over the world and Taylor Swift break one billion dollars in tour revenue.
This summer has felt so feminist-ly feminine: a blatant show of womanhood in a way that doesn't assume it is an inherently painful experience; a celebration of female joy. I wore bright pink and a giant bow in my hair to the movie theater and gleefully waved at the rows of women marching by. My sister plays Cruel Summer on repeat and we dance around the living room, and then we browse the Aritzia website for clothes we can't afford. The world finally seems to be coming around to the idea that women can be feminine and still #GirlBosses, right?
...I fear it's not that simple.
Let's start with Taylor Swift, only because I recently convinced my parents to let me (try to) get tickets for the Toronto show next year. The average woman who attends a Taylor Swift show is spending $1354 dollars on tickets, costumes, restaurants, hotels, and transportation. The effect this is having on the world cannot be understated: cities have made Taylor honorary mayor, begging her to come visit to boost their economy. Similarly, according to economists, Beyonce's world tour has affected inflation in Sweden, and probably will in the other countries she's set to visit, too.
This proves (to me, at least) something I've suspected since the One Direction-crazed days: that women pump and funnel the entertainment economy. Tours, movies, and merchandise are all consumed in the largest numbers by female fans, and thus ought to be curated towards this very demographic. Women are thriving in today's economy -- the rate of female unemployment is 3.4%, the lowest it has ever been, and perhaps more importantly: young women (late teens, early 20s) have the highest percentage of disposable income and the highest marginal propensity to consume.
In short: the female dollar is becoming increasingly valuable to business executives, and thus attempts to appeal to young women are becoming increasingly deliberate. Where once, the economy depended on and advertised to men, the world now looks to women to keep consumerism alive.
Yet, who holds the money? 2023 surveys reveal that only 10% of mutual fund employees and 23% of investment bankers in the United States are women. More than half of all men invest in the stock market somehow, whereas only 15-25% of women are shareholders of any kind. Female financial literacy is lower than that of men, and these disparities are only wider amongst young adults (under 30).
This creates an interesting sense of cognitive dissonance: women are expected to bolster the economy, but only men can benefit from it. In this light, advertising to women to attract the female dollar seems almost condescending.
In fact, Taylor Swift's record company (and the entertainment industry in general) is controlled largely by men, and so female consumers are actually subject to the exorbitant market prices that they set. While several (male) record executives are set to reap extraordinary wealth from this tour, the only woman becoming a billionaire from all this female spending is Swift herself, whose performative feminism has landed her in several controversies over the years. This does beg a larger question -- why does feminism only ever seem to serve this elite class of women already in positions of power and wealth?
Now...Barbie. Before I offend everyone: I love the Barbie phenomenon. The marketing, the cast, the campiness of the set design, the sheer fun -- it all makes me incandescently happy. But when I heard Ben Shapiro and other extreme right-wing conservatives thought Barbie was too feminist, I cackled; the movie is such a bland, inoffensive, and vapid brand of feminism, I can't imagine it being called "woke propaganda" of any conspiratorial kind.
The film is Kroger-brand Feminism, designed to be made palatable for every demographic and political leaning. The misogyny portrayed is so on-the-nose is IS the nose: little boys teasing little girls, catcalling, a Big Scary Mattel Executive who wants to put Barbie (who represents all women) into a BOX (metaphorical and literal)! The women back in Barbieland are easily brainwashed into believing that the Patriarchy is great and completely logical, despite being intelligent Nobel Prize laureates and Supreme Court justices in their own right. Besides being a dig at conservative women, what does this plot point mean? That women are easily susceptible to rhetoric that hurts them? That ideas like the patriarchy are easy to buy into as long as there's good propaganda?
But Barbie IS the "good propaganda" designed to make us "buy into" the capitalistic machinations of a soulless, misogynistic corporation and forget that Mattel has actively contributed to the struggles of women! Gerwig inserts a few self aware jokes about body image and fascism, but overall spends the entire film absolving Barbie of the damage she's done by making her character the victim of misogyny as well, and weaponizing Will Ferrell's incompetence to convince the audience that Mattel executives are "too stupid" to have done anything cunning on purpose.
The truth is that Mattel isn't just responsible for the body image issues of countless young girls. They also regularly underpay and abuse their (mostly female) workers in their China production facility, subjecting them to sexual harassment, brutal working conditions and hours, and risky/unsafe job environments. Actual "Barbie Girls" -- ie. the women who work for Barbie -- can NOT "be anything", like the brand promotes, but Gerwig wouldn't dare address these kinds of uncomfortable criticisms leveled at Mattel. Instead, you, the female consumer, are offered a deal: $9.99 for a movie ticket and popcorn to solve sexism. Why? Because feminism is trendy and popular and women have money to spend on companies that pretend to have aligning ethical values.
It's feminism commodified: Girl-Boss Feminine Self-Actualization, but it's actually Margot Robbie deciding to choose the (grossly misogynistic and problematic) real world over the (matriarchal) Barbie DreamWorld. Motherhood, but simultaneously villainized and portrayed as the ultimate accomplishment of womanhood (see: "mothers stand still so their daughters can see how far they've come", and Barbie visiting her gynocologist on her first day as a woman). It's pseudo-feminism at its finest, designed to make women proud to invest in a noble social cause while enacting as little change as possible, because real progress would topple the current social structures Mattel executives benefit greatly from. Sprinkle in Greta Gerwig, feminist icon, and a superficial rant about how hard being a woman is to preemptively deter any criticism.
The difficult questions Barbie pretends it's addressing-- namely, what it means to be a woman, to be human, to solve systemic problems, to be a projection of someone else's imagination-- are all cast aside halfway through the film. Gerwig makes Ken the most compelling character of the film by vilifying a man genuinely looking for meaning and purpose who hits the wrong solution, when in fact those men are victims of the patriarchy the same way women are. But exploring that nuance would be too in-depth for Mattel. Barbie, after all, is feminism if you don't think about it, whimsical and virtue-signal preachy at the expense of real meaning.
And it's all for us, the female consumer. Aren't we just the luckiest?
With all our collective power as consumers, it is time we become more aware about how we are controlled: not by men in fur coats watching Snyder Cuts and buying horses, but by systems (designed by men) that manipulate violence, finance, and more to be in their favor. For the first time, we have money to put where our mouths are.
Now we just have to figure out where that is.
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