In today’s modern world anyone can be omnipresent through the use of satellites and the internet. Hence the ideologies of feminism and gender have permeated most societies and have caused a dialogue about the things that feminism entails. Most notably the discourse has moved from being one of social change and liberation to being something of the past which most people have become desensitized to in what is now referred to as the post feminist era. The supposition is that feminism as a movement has achieved all it set out to in the way of bringing about equality for women and the current struggles for the feminist movement is considered to be complaining for the sake of complaining. Out of the movement there was an emergence of successful women in the same arenas as men which was considered to be proof of the success of the movement. Feminism has become unpopular “By means of the tropes of freedom and choice which are now inextricable connected with the category of ‘young women’, feminism is decisively aged and made to seem redundant” (McRobbie, 255:2004)
However, these notions of success are elusive “Female achievement predicated not on feminism, but on ‘female individualism’” (McRobbie, 258:2004). In addition companies have used this as a strategy to subvert the ostensible progress that feminism provided women by enslaving them to consumerism and once again centralizing the site of feminist power as being purely physical. The new world has reinvented the wheel of commodifying female sexuality by guising it as women being in control of their beauty and being able to convert beauty into a tool of agency for attaining success in a male dominated world. Ironically despite the fact that feminism is said to have brought all these freedoms and leveled the playing field for men and women, it is acknowledged as being a fallacy through the very idea of being able to take control in a male world. This point to the fact that we all know it is still a man’s world and that women still need to prove themselves as equals or compete in it. Feminism drew too much attention to itself and thus has become it’s own undoing in that men in large consumerist corporations have taken the tools of feminism and are using them to reshape their campaigns essentially using feminism to feed into their economies of attention enabling them to maintain their positions of social and financial power. This is illustrated in the Wonderbra commercial “At the same time the advertisement expects to provoke feminist condemnation as a means of generating publicity” (McRobbie, 259:2004). What is the response of women to all of this? Silence, at the risk of seeming complacent because it is better than being perceived as fanatic Women’s Libers (The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom” (McRobbie, 260:2004).
This represents an internal gaze. This is an unlikely possibility because the media teach women how to be beautiful through prescribing and constructing image management. Women are through various mediations as though they have inverted the male gaze and that the performance of aesthetic beauty is for the female self. Female sexuality has become embedded and embroiled in popular culture through the use of the female body as a site of consumerism. Commodity feminism is the term used to describe this phenomenon “the complex and clever assimilation of fragments of feminist /post feminist discourse in social advertising” (Lazar, 507:2007). Such examples of this are clearly seen the Dove Real Beauty adverts where a model comes in for a photo shoot. The model is made up and photographed. Afterwards the photo is then digitally altered so that it fits with what is now considered the standard of beauty. The photo of the model no longer is the model it is a a perfect possibly even different woman in the advert. The tagline reads: no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. This links to a social responsibility organization called the Dove Self Esteem for Girls Fund. Dove is playing on the fact that what is mediated as true beauty is all fabricated and through the use of their product women can be beautiful naturally as themselves without the aid of technology and make up specialists. However, the underlining point is the same, that left to their own devices women are not beautiful and that beauty is as a result of the use of some product. Thus beauty exists as an object independent of the barer. The advert informs us that the product industry continues to shape perceptions of female bodies and acknowledges the social damage it causes “The incorporation makes critique of the ads harder as the message of consumption is threaded together with voices of social consciousness” (Lazar, 507:2006).
The question then is what has really changed from the days pre-feminism to now in the post feminist era. Feminism was about empowerment and now advertising makes the same argument through presenting products of consumption as agents of empowerment. However the empowerment is based upon the old social norms of women as being objects whose quality related directly to their aesthetic value. The other way in which women overcome inequality is to perform of do masculinity as is the case of Agent Olivia Dunam and agent of the FBI Fringe Division in the popular serial Fringe. She shows no emotion, and always wears a suite (with pants) and flat shoes with hair hair drearily drawn into a neat pony tail. Her appearance makes no effort to do feminine beauty and therefore she is considered serious and is able to be the best agent in the division. Her ability to be like a man makes her a successful woman.
In order for feminism to be considered a real success structures of patriarchal social order would have to change and the existing gender binary would have to provide a space for negotiation where both genders could submit to each other in a mutually beneficial way. The problem with feminism was that it presented a threat to men and the male socio/political order. Feminism emasculated men by presenting the possibility of the erasure of the usefulness of the role of men. Images of women performing as men and essentially do the work traditionally perceived as a man’s work throws the role of men into nebula and hence men perpetuate conditions that maintain the status quo that keeps them in positions of power and reaffirms notions of masculinity.
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