If you think that the site of female emancipation lies at the feet of a corporate media behemoth, you’re as deluded as Barbie.
Pop feminism is in a very weird place at present, and what could be more ripe for dragging out hours of tedious discourse than the Oscars. It’s as predictable as the sun rising.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organisation founded in 1928 to both celebrate achievements and innovation in the then young and plucky film industry in America, has 9,500 qualified voting members. Due to its membership’s reputation of being overly stale and male (76% were male, 94% were white, and the average member age was 63), in 2020 it sought to address this; now 33% of the membership identify as women and 19% are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Not exactly the kind of extreme progress people were hoping for certainly, but at least a movement of the dial. Although it’s ultimately a popularity contest, the films that achieve nomination have huge industry campaigns behind them, which takes a lot of time and, most importantly, money. This is why smaller production houses struggle to get recognition and sometimes baffling decisions get made because a big media conglomerate has chucked loads of money at a campaign (whoooo remembers Green Book??). The competition this year has been stiff, with a vast quantity of big budget productions telling a wide variety of stories meeting a very high standard, which is ultimately good for audiences as well as the industry. There is minimal space for recognition and when competition is of such a high quality, it’s not surprising that people’s favourites get left out.
Then in comes the internet. There is something to be said about the culture we have now of everyone being entitled to and encouraged to have their say at all times on any topic, regardless of their knowledge, expertise or ability to speak in an informed way, but that’s a much larger topic not to be discussed here. What is striking, if unsurprising, is the volume of time and effort being dedicated at present to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie not being nominated in the best director and best actress categories for Barbie (2022). Lily Gladstone is the first Indigenous American woman nominated for best actress for her role in Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2022), yet this historical achievement has been roundly ignored by a certain brand of feminist who think that Gerwig and Robbie’s exclusion is the real story.
Besides the fact that Robbie and Gerwig have been recognised for their achievements in their technical fields (producing and screenwriting respectively), this is simply not good enough. The fact that the pair have one of the largest global box office takings in history at $1.4 billion and managed to build an immense excitement for going to the cinema again for the first time since covid is also not good enough; they also must have a little golden trophy or it was all for nought.
There has been more feminist ire from the commentariat and mountains of discourse directed at Robbie and Gerwig’s lack of inclusion in two fields at an awards competition than the fact that thousands of women in Gaza right now are having to have c-sections in refugee camps with no anaesthetic.
The intersection of stan fandom culture and a thin grasp of feminist thought has whipped up a perfect storm. The pop culture industrial complex has managed to shift our collective focus away from issues that matter to dissecting hollow trivialities in often obsessive detail to extract some feminist meaning. The upshot of this is a lack of understanding of who feminism ultimately should be for; is it the high profile few or the most vulnerable and invisible in our society. Pop culture is actually a prime jumping off point for understanding how society functions and intersects with feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, racism and other topics. The problem is when it becomes the only lens through which those issues are discussed. That is not to say women’s achievements in their fields aren’t important; for example Gladstone’s nod should be the big story of nominations day. What it is to say is that column inches and online vitriol should be directed equally, if not more so to, those women and causes that are often overlooked.
The world of Online now is particularly busy and hard to navigate; for every million posts debating in insane detail as to whether the latest thing Taylor Swift has done is a feminist dog whistle or not, we are bogged down with noise that ultimately crowds the space out for quieter voices that self-proclaimed feminists should be hearing. The radical roots of the movement have been moulded and tidied up by capitalism into a neat little product you can buy. Popular feminism has become a tote bag, a hollow platitude in an ugly font plastered over a photograph of a sunset, a slogan on a t-shirt made by people paid less than minimum wage. As Dawn Foster wrote in her book Lean Out “Feminism now means you don’t always do the dishes, or that you look down your nose at women’s magazines, rather than meaning you fight capitalist systems that enable continued attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable.”
You have to ask who does this benefit? Who chooses what stories are amplified? Who is most invested in keeping marginalised women as a fringe interest? The big media behemoths, governments, corporations, capitalists, all those to whom emancipation of all of us is a danger and would rather you focused on fluff than substance. Many of the board of directors at Warner Brothers, the company who own Mattel’s film rights who have merrily lined their pockets with huge chunks of Barbie takings, sit in directorships and boards of other huge conglomerates. Price Waterhouse Coopers is just one of those and oh boy to they have a list of embroilments and scandals as long as trip to the moon. Just a few illustrious examples include rampant gender and age based employment discrimination, tax evasion, fraud, water privatisation in India, dodgy backroom oil dealings in Brazil and West Africa, aiding Russian oligarchs, pension fraud, and to top it off lobbying against gay marriage in Australia. Is this the kind of association you want to look to as a representation of feminism? Is one of the fluffier and ultimately hollow end points of the Barbie movie, that the corporate behemoth can be reformed, not a distraction from the fact that it can’t be? I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions there.
What we need to learn is that capitalism and the organisations invested in its continuation do not contain the answers to society’s problems. A handful of huge unwieldy media companies are not your friend or a tiny little guy who deserves hours of your efforts defending. Only dismantling these systems that keep us in our places will give everyone the kind of freedom that is truly meaningful, but that’s a story for another day. What is essential in this day and age is keeping a critical eye on the content machine, on what stories and issues are given the space and column inches and endless debate, asking yourself who benefits and why. That is more important than ever.
EDIT: I wrote this before Hillary Clinton chimed in with her support for Barbie in a post so unbelievably cringe my soul nearly left my body.