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When I interviewed Bitch Media's Andi Zeisler about her new book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement for this week's paper, she had a lot to say about the rise of marketplace feminism, which co-opts feminist language and ideas to sell things, without accomplishing any actual feminist goals (think: Dove's horrible sketch artist ads that were like lol women hate themselves and we're here to help with soap, or whatever the fuck). Here are some gems from our discussion that, due to space issues, didn't make it into print.

In our interview, we talked about how the shallow, hot-take-focused, internet-enabled state of media contributes to marketplace feminism. Here's Zeisler on outlets that are doing a better job than that: You know, I didn’t love everything that they did and they definitely had some really big blind spots around gender, but I thought that ESPN’s Grantland site did a really great job in sort of fusing politics and popular culture and celebrity in great ways. Mother Jones has always been a publication I really really admire, and certainly as an independently owned publisher, I have just all kinds of respect for Mother Jones for really being able to stay their course, same with the Nation. The American Prospect is another good one... I really love the Toast even though I have to say the stuff I love on the Toast is often the really super absurdist humor stuff.

But yeah, absolutely... I don’t want to make it sound like I’m painting the entire internet with a broad brush, because I really do think there’s a lot of original stuff, there’s a lot of great multimedia reporting. Fusion is another one that does really good multimedia reporting, and even the New York Times. I often get really annoyed with the kind of stodginess and the sort of need to be on top of stuff that everyone else on the internet has known about for months. The amount of energy and resources that they put into their interactive reporting I think is great and exactly what an organization like that should be doing.

On what drives marketplace feminism: We want to be able to feel good about what we consume, and if we can feel as good as possible about that, then we don’t have to do as much interrogation of ourselves. And this too is something that is often happening in these sort of listicle feminist stories... People are kind of twisting themselves into pretzels to justify their love for something or their interest in something, rather than just say, "You know what? I can still be a feminist and my feminism doesn’t have to be reflected in every single one of my choices" … And I do see this as something that is especially pronounced with women, and especially with young women... women end up politicizing very personal decisions that don’t need to be politicized, and spending a lot of time and energy kind of agonizing about them, and hand-wringing, and trying to find ways to let themselves off the hook for doing something they want to do, whereas most most men just kind of do it and go along with it, and don’t sit around worrying about, like, "What does it mean for my Marxism that I wax my body hair?"

On the consequences of marketplace feminism: [I]t really does prioritize what end up being discussions that are relevant to people who are not in the precarious position of a lot of women who still need to be liberated in very basic ways. And so it really does end up pulling a lot of focus. And it’s not necessarily to say that outlets who are covering, you know, the latest fronts in the wars over high heels or pubic hair or whatever—It’s not to say that those outlets would be covering, for instance, women in poverty or black women and police brutality. It’s not to say that that space is replacing space that would otherwise be taken up with more grassroots issues—it probably wouldn’t. But at the same time we’re definitely legitimizing that kind of obsessive, monomaniacal focus on surface things and taking ourselves further and further away from much more foundation-level problems within gender equality.

On how the low, low bar for celebrity feminism could be raised: A couple of media literacy folks I know a couple years ago, when celebrities were being asked about feminism on the red carpet, made the point that all it would take would be a slight shift in the line of questioning itself to be more meaningful. You know, instead of asking celebrities, well how do you define feminism?—as though there’s not a perfectly good definition out there already—they could be asking how does your feminism manifest in your everyday life, or what are the most important feminist issues to you? Just these really minor tweaks could make a difference.

And then as far as celebrities themselves changing the conversation, I think certainly speaking more openly about the struggles that they face just even to work, and being more open about how the sausage gets made in Hollywood or in the pop music industry or whatever—that could be wildly beneficial. And I think that is happening. I think Amy Schumer is someone who has done a really good job in being transparent about that stuff… When people say, “Oh, isn’t it such an exciting time to be a woman in comedy?” she’s like, “What the fuck are you talking about? No.”

Because it’s really easy to buy into the "Yay! Up with women! We’re all empowered now!" attitude, but that again obscures the systems part of it and it obscures the fact that there’s no sustained empowerment if the system itself doesn’t change and if people aren’t open about why it needs to change.