AHQ: Celebrity Feminism
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“Dear Greta, What is your take on celebrities who try to incorporate feminism into their brand? What standards should we hold them to? ”
Dear Allie,
I was obsessed with this question in high school. I remember feeling truly stymied by what to do about celebrities like Lena Dunham or Taylor Swift who at the time marketed themselves as girl-power feminists. Celebrity feminism can mean a lot of things, running the gamut from simply using the word “feminism” as a marketing scheme with nothing behind it, to a celebrity becoming wholeheartedly interested in advancing feminist causes. That said, when I was most interested in this question, I was mainly curious about the people in the middle of that spectrum: celebrities who take on feminism as a side project, seemingly in good faith, yet often end up more performative than helpful.
These celebrities incorporate feminism into their branding, then underdeliver and often counter what little feminist work they do by being actively racist or otherwise harmful. For instance, though Lena Dunham would tweet statements like “Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape,” when her friend was accused of raping a 17-year-old girl, Dunham went on to publicly accuse the girl of lying about her experience. This was made all the more confusing to me by the fact that the media really focuses on women celebrities like Dunham: her successes were reported on as feminist breakthroughs, and her pitfalls were deemed indicative of issues in the feminist movement.
As a highschooler whose understanding of feminism was being shaped by what I was reading online, I was preoccupied with trying to figure out how to think about these celebrity feminists. It seemed like the hypocritical white “feminism” they were giving us was the best we could get––and most other celebrities weren’t even discussing social justice in any way at all. So, could we really even ask for more? And what would that look like?
I bring up high school because at a time where my primary interaction with celebrity feminism was to reap its one benefit (that is, stoking awareness) the stakes seemed very high. Now, I have ways to develop my own politics beyond analyzing Lena Dunham’s antics. Social media has made it easier than ever to engage with well-studied, developed feminist content. At this point in my life, I feel comfortable turning to Kim Kardashian for drama and to more informed sources for feminist education, and I am not desperate for overlap between the two.
The main downfall of celebrity feminism is, of course, that celebrities don’t tend to be very good at speaking on social justice matters. The issue starts with who we deem worthy of celebrity status; at large, the people most uplifted by the American public for attention are more practiced at entertaining than teaching and doing self-interrogation work. Celebrities have built-in audiences, meaning that when they make a foray into activism, they often have the clout of an expert without the knowledge of one. Their mistakes––however well-intentioned––can have outsized effects. The combination of under-education on a topic and a large audience often leads to half-formed takes that are gaffes at best and harmful at worst.
Because feminism is usually tangential to the celebrity’s career and fame, they often get a free pass for their “unintentional” errors––or worse, the media reports upon their mistakes as a part of the feminist movement. That’s where I think the real danger is: not holding celebrities to the same standards we hold each other, simply because the bar is so low for their involvement in real issues.
Jameela Jamil is a good example. When she first began advocating for “body positivity,” she parroted the empty, commercialized, Target-friendly rhetoric of the white feminist movement. Jamil became a spokesperson not for the actual body positivity movement,* but for a decontextualized and ahistorical body positivity that centered her own––beautiful, thin––body and advocated for self-esteem over structural change. Even now, you can easily find articles online that praise Jamil for being a leader of the body positivity movement for her bravery in doing the hard work of finding herself beautiful.
*Body positivity is a political movement founded in tandem with the significantly more polarizing Fat Rights Movement, which advocated for structural changes to how fat people are treated in America, and which to this day challenges the hegemonic ideal of a “perfect body,” one which is necessarily white, cis, able-bodied, thin, heterosexual, and which conforms to Eurocentric beauty standards.
When it comes to what we can ask of celebrities who incorporate feminism into their brand––and I’m not sure there’s a way for celebrities to advocate for social justice publicly without incorporating it into their brand––then I think there are some basic tenets we can reasonably hold them to: to self-educate, to know when and how to take up space, accountability, honesty, self-reflection, and to work toward the common good. Oftentimes, celebrities only take on subjects that directly affect themselves, and do not do much to self-educate before posting about it with the hope to “educate” their followers. It’s fair to ask more of them!
The best case scenario for celebrity feminism is not that all celebrities become experts in gender equality and collective organizing (this would drastically alter the course of the Bachelor franchise for the worse, and therefore would not be worth it), but simply that when a person calls themselves a feminist they are held to the same standards as everyone else. And that when a celebrity spreads misinformation or causes harm online––whether in the name of feminism or not––they correct their mistake and make amends equally as publicly. Jamil herself has in recent years done a formidable job of explaining where and how she made a mistake, what she would do differently in the future, and apologizing to those she has hurt, now calling herself a “feminist in progress.”
In sum, I think we as a society have really set the bar impressively low for celebrity activism. That said, I would ask of celebrities the same thing I would ask of anyone else trying to do good in the world. Jameela Jamil, if you’re reading this, I’d love to chat.