We are conditioned to be consumers since birth. I still think it's kind of incumbent on us as consumers to know the difference between something that's truly progressive and something that's just trying to get us to buy a product. Capitalism, ultimately, it's not about equality, it's not about social justice.
Capitalism is a system that's ultimately predicated on and depends on some form of inequality. Feminism has always intersected with capitalism in terms of women's labor and gendered divisions of labor.
There's always been a way in which capitalism has been able to almost get in on the ground floor of feminist movements and use them for their own ends.
The media is such a huge piece of how we understand feminism, particularly celebrity feminism, and I really do think that so much of how that stuff gets filtered through can be either finessed or really stymied by how media talks about it.
Media economics now are so dependent on people saying controversial things and an entire mini-news cycle springing up around this thing that that person said. It really behooves people in the public eye to know what's in the zeitgeist and to have opinions on it. It becomes a thing of is this genuine, or is this just a way for celebrities to keep themselves relevant in a time when this is obviously a hot topic?
People who are invested in feminist movements are going to be talking about it regardless. Because we have such powerful tools to disseminate information and share resources, especially via social media.
Advertising is brilliant. It's an industry that spends billions and billions of dollars to get you to react the way it wants you to react.
The nineties as a pop cultural sphere was a really fertile time for feminism that was grounded and located in popular culture. I'm talking about before the Spice Girls - Sassy Magazine, riot grrrl, the Beastie Boys, Nirvana. You had this alternative culture that was very much speaking up on behalf of women and in favor of women.
It's very easy to co-opt subcultures, and I think that scene was very easily coopted, not just on a feminist level but on a capitalist level in general. It's hard to see now because, to me, now there are so many competing pluralistic subcultures.
