Imlisanen Jamir
Behold! The advertising industry, once bent on selling us sex is now selling us its disgust with sexism.
With strong empowering messages, if we take a look at our Instagram feed or any store selling stuff to girls and women, we’d think that these slogans were the key to women finally gaining the confidence they need to single-handedly tear down the patriarchy.
In all, it means we will see more drives to sell young women empowerment through individual brands or projects. Likely ones with catchy slogans that can take off on Twitter and ignore any boring analysis of gender inequality in favour of feeling good.
The idea that confidence and self-belief is what the debate and struggle is missing is seductive: it encourages sisterly encouragement – likes, shares and stories told in 140 characters are easily digestible, and a soft way to get adolescents, in particular, hooked on the movement – and, of course, your brand.
People who are in the happiness business are financially incentivized to believe that we have a lot of control over our happiness, and there's a lot of kind of…massaging, shall we say… of the evidence in that direction.
The real genuine evidence doesn't really support that. And also it can quite easily morph into a kind of victim blaming. This idea that if we’re not happy, we just haven't worked hard enough and somehow it’s our own fault.
We see it everywhere, to the point where it's become slightly meaningless and has very, very little to do with actual power as such.
There has been a tendency to sell this view that happiness is kind of an individual responsibility. So instead of thinking it's society's responsibility to create the conditions under which everyone can be happy, it’s like, the individual needs to be going to mindfulness classes and reading self-help books and writing in their gratitude journal and doing yoga classes and all of these things to kind of almost pull yourself up by your bootstraps to make yourself happy.
This is quite a punitive approach to happiness and it's quite a weirdly individualistic approach. A lot of the same principles can be applied to this corporatized idea of empowerment as well.
In fact, focusing on empowerment without focusing on the structures that keep women disempowered is helping to perpetuate the injustice the movement claims to fight.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
