For this week’s blog post, I thought I’d cover a question that has been shuffled around for quite some time, and has been answered by many different people according to their opinions. This quotation from Angela McRobbie’s article, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture” raises many questions which I would like to analyze further, and perhaps create my own opinionated answer to.

“The media has become the key site for defining codes of sexual conduct. It casts judgment and establishes the rules of play. Across these many channels of communication feminism is routinely disparaged. This is another Butler point, why is feminism so hated? Why do young women recoil in horror at the very idea of the feminist? To count as a girl today appears to require this kind of ritualistic denunciation, which in turn suggests that one strategy in the disempowering of feminism includes it being historicized and generationalised and thus easily rendered out of date. It would be far too simplistic to trace a patter in media from popular feminism (or “prime time feminism” including TV programmes like L.A. Law) in the early 1990s, to niche feminism (BBC Radio 4, Women’s Hour, and the Women’s Page of the Guardian newspaper), in the mid-1990s, and then to overtly unpopular feminism (new century), as though these charted a chronological “great moving right show” as Stuart Hall might put it (1989)” (McRobbie 258).

I think asking ourselves why feminism so hated and avoided is important, especially when the term has evolved in meaning (as mentioned above) over time. I personally think that it has mostly to do with the way in which feminism is constantly trying to be marketed, when frankly it isn’t a topic that can be revamped as easily as by re-branding. Feminism looks at serious issues, the biggest one being the oppression and violence directed towards women. Al-Jazeera states, “re-branding feminism is unlikely to address any of these issues, as these issues are not particularly glossy or sellable to begin with. Feminism becomes popular when feminism becomes sexy and untroublesome. You’ll notice that mainstream media is suddenly very preoccupied with the feminist movement whenever the “feminist movement” is blonde, thin, and topless. The irony of Elle magazine, a publication that has long been among those responsible for reinforcing unattainable standards of beauty and perfection for women, attempting to re-brand feminism should tell you something about what their gussied-up feminism would look like. The stereotypes that make feminism look bad are, in fact, the reason feminism exists in the first place. The notion that “lesbian” is an insult is homophobic and the ever-popular claim that feminists are all bitter and undersexed is just old-fashioned misogyny. Perhaps the problem, in terms of feminism’s image, isn’t bad marketing but sexism” (Murphy).

This suggests that feminism is more of a “movement, not a product”, and therefore cannot become more appealing to people simply by changing the makeup of the matter. There are deeper roots here, and instead of trying to make feminism appeal to people on the surface, it instead has to be properly portrayed to people, educating them on what feminists really uphold rather than categorizing them all as “man haters” is what would be most effective.

 Bibliography

Murphy, Meghan. “Feminism: Unpopular Because of Bad Marketing?” Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2014.