NICHOLE VAUGHAN

I’m thinking about the messaging behind feminism, the pressure it faces (socially and economically), and the way feminists are currently aligning their voice with an intersectional vision, yet still caught in power structures that know them better than they know the movement.

I read the book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflection of Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for The New Yorker, in the fall of 2019. Her introductory essay, “The I in the Internet” has webbed its way into my thinking about the internet since I read it. I’ve always been drawn to performing, how I am seen by others and the (in)congruency with the way I see myself. This dynamic within my “self” is complicated and nuanced, and I dislike that the internet shrinky-dinks our identity by changing our edges and size in the pressure of the internet’s brevity and the heat of the internet’s discourse. It leaves us with a morphed product of something that we took care of to color and create. In the introduction to her book, Tolentino explains the choice for the title, claiming that the internet is a “trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault” (x). With the collapse of context on the internet, we can roll our eyes, shake our fists, or suck our teeth at something that someone else posts, while feeling a self-righteous pride in our ability to display our opinions on the internet as the end of a discussion instead of a beginning.

We cannot ignore the discussion around race that is happening right now in the US and the entire world. After the murder of George Floyd, I, like many others, took to the internet. The teacher part of my identity posted a list of books for people to start with if they wanted to learn about race. After I posted, I started to think about the reality of a person actually reading any or all of those books. The teacher in me was assigning homework to all of my Instagram followers. Would they do it? People also posted to their Instagram Stories books that they purchased to read, in order to “do better.” But, as Lauren Michelle Jackson voices in the article that she wrote for Vulture, “What is an Anti-racist Reading List For?” the act of reading is where the work comes in, and it cannot and should not happen as a “zoological” practice of studying Black people, but understanding their humanity and feeling the beautiful, powerful sentences imprint and dance on your soul when you ingest them with your eyes (Toni Morrison and James Baldwin taught me the music and momentum that could be built into a sentence). Black literature is more than just the Black experience; it’s the human experience. But, if you have not read Black authors, then it is difficult to arrive at that understanding because you have never been inclined or drawn to it before (maybe I’m extremely cynical). Jackson ends her article taunting the practice of making an anti-racist reading list in the first place considering the context that we’re living in, “Calls to read more and to read this strikes me as particularly funny, or at least comic, in the middle of the pandemic when everyone admits that even our customarily wan attention spaces have been decimated. There are snappier places to glean the long-story-short of America.” Like swiping on an Instagram post.

This argument has been written about and proven in too many ways already. Social media apps, in their best version, are able to spread information and organize people (The Egyptian Revolution in 2011, 2015’s Black Lives Matter, the ongoing Standing Rock protests in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, 2017’s Women’s March, and 2017’s March for Our Lives). In their worst version (which seems to be the most common), they provide a cheap substitute for connection and activism. I’ve been wondering about how this version of social media has influenced the current message around what it means to be a “good” feminist during these conversations around race.

Feminism, like social media, has been cultivated and co-opted by capitalism. Feminism on social media is often marketed to us in the form of “self-help” and “self-care.” Massages, face creams, eye masks, silk pajamas, and glasses of champagne bubbling in a Boom(erang) are all named or hashtagged with “self-care” when posted on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop may be the most ubiquitous voice around this messaging. As I watched Paltrow’s brand rise I laughed to myself and wondered, “What would Simone de Beauvoir or Audre Lorde say about this?” (I have a screenplay idea where de Beauvoir and Paltrow get drunk together in a gentrified neighborhood. Anyone can have that idea if they want it.) While capitalism has tricked us into thinking that spending money is a form of self-care that will give us enough confidence to allow us to “lean in,” as Sheryl Sandberg would say, it also has tricked us into thinking that we are committing overt feminist acts by committing ourself to all things feminine.

Sandberg was the first in the #girlboss phase that emphasized the action of “leaning in” to one’s seat at the table to advocate for what she needs. But what if she didn’t have a seat at the table? Or even a work culture to lean in to because she was considered an expendable (now rebranded “essential”) worker? Or what if she was fired when she leaned in? Sandberg’s argument has been criticized for the place of privilege that she wrote it from, but it also does not ask that corporations themselves “lean in” to create fairer work cultures: utilizing fair employment practices, paying women equally, advocating for or providing universal health care and childcare, providing women with paid time off (longer than the mandated 12 weeks in California) for maternity leave, and picking up the onus of the fight for equality.

A friend who read Sandberg’s book and works in corporate culture commented with conviction, “I’m going to start acting like a straight, white man.” I shuddered to hear that, thinking that this form of feminism seems to ask women to emulate the qualities of hegemony that usually no one likes and to change parts of their personality to assimilate to the culture of straight, white men (read: powerful). Then, women could change the system (if, by that point, when the system serves them, they still feel inclined to). 

The argument to “lean in” happened with the uptick and boom of the make-up tutorials online. Women could make money using their femininity on the internet through makeup and hair tutorials. Embracing femininity served as a symbolic act against criticism of all things feminine.

Makeup’s message developed as feminism did, and it changed its message from explicit displays of femininity to a look that was popularized by the brand Glossier. The message was to look as if one had done such a good job of taking care of her skin and self that she no longer needed makeup! Women were to use this pricey (anything more expensive than the Walgreens one block away is expensive to me) makeup to make it look like they aren’t wearing any.

This minimalist approach to the way we did our makeup coincided with the trend to approach your home in the same way. Marie Kondo popularized minimalism, which asked men and women to strip their lives of any excess. The process of “tidying” could rid our lives of clutter, but people also replaced those things with new, on-trend (usually beige or white) furniture, pillows, beds, plant pots, bookshelves, and clothing. This effort for “self-care” through editing our possessions brings us to material, commercial ends. This life that was promoted to negate the idea of “more” culture that capitalism feeds on, actually promoted it: more time, more experiences, more space, and more money to restyle your life to utter emptiness because if your space is empty and decluttered, then your brain is decluttered and clear and could make you be a better thinker for your job (there is the counterargument that there is a madness to our cluttered brain and that it is useful to pack it with different metaphorical chairs to sit on from time to time, but that’s another essay).

I want to remind you that although men and women used Marie Kondo’s signature process, the act of minimalizing one’s house was very much a gendered, domestic act wrapped in the ethically-created, recycled wrapping paper of “self-care.” If we take care of our spaces, we are taking care of ourselves. Since self-care has become a commercialized limb of feminism, the concept of self-care is changing as I type this, just like commercial feminism. So, what does that have to do with the moment that we’re in right now? The moment suggests that the only way that one can be a good feminist right now is if they are also publicly anti-racist. This is not a bad thing, in theory. I would love for all of my haters and homies to understand that the struggle for racial freedom intersects with the struggle for the freedom of women (and every other person who is oppressed).

So we’re inundated with the same Instagram post on many of our friends’ stories as a sign of defense against those who turn to the internet for opposition and as well as creating the impression that they are politically engaged and informed. People scroll, swipe, and think about themselves and how they wish to be seen by reposting or posting something to social media because of the pressure to perform (violence, etc.). But this performative activism for intersectional feminism models itself off the same mentality of self-care feminism expressed as minimalism: it secretly requires excess. It requires an excess of time and attention; two things that those who are economically handcuffed to their jobs and other obligations besides scrolling the internet do not have. White women, specifically, post about what they can do with their privilege, implying that they do not plan to give it up anytime soon. White celebrities, especially, go about with this bizarre need to “personally participate in an ideology of equality that ostensibly requires them to chill out,” Tolentino writes.

There is also a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it turns into a show. When I see these posts arise from voices who have never once posted about race before, the cynic in me wonders if they are doing it to still have a dominant voice on social media, the hopeful humanist in me wonders if these terrible times have brought clarity, or if it is just a trend of our times. No matter what the motivation is, when I attempt to discern if the post is performative or genuine, I cannot help but think of James Baldwin’s words: “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”