'Be a Lady They Said': Transformative Viral Sensation or Superficial Trend?

Written by Rebecca Frew, BA(Hons) History and Politics and International Relations

Introduced by Catherine Eschle: this is the first in a series of blog posts by final-year Politics undergraduates taking the class L2421 Feminism and Politics in the spring of 2020. I asked the students to reflect on an extra-curricular feminist event they had recently attended or on a contemporary high-profile gender issue or controversy of their choosing. While exploring how the event or controversy might be illuminated by feminist academic literature, or push this literature in new directions, students also had to write in an appropriately accessible and engaging style. As you will see from the small sample of posts we publish here, some students made this challenging task look easy, and showed considerable 'feminist curiosity' and independence of mind in their analyses. And all this despite severe disruption to the class in the context of the UCU strike and the COVID-19 lockdown. I hope you find these posts, as I did, enjoyable, thought-provoking and persuasive. While later contributions focus on US presidential candidates and Scottish MPs, our opener by Rebecca Frew is an apt reminder that feminists understand the 'political' as far broader than these formal decision-making roles and institutions, concerned as they are to contest the ways in which power shapes cultural representation and the most intimate areas of everyday life. 

‘Be a size zero. Be a double zero. Be nothing. Be less than nothing.’ The powerful ‘Be a Lady’ video released a few months ago echoed across the globe, confronting the overwhelming pressures placed on women and their bodies. It spoke to the patriarchal standards of femininity into which many women are so deeply indoctrinated that they condition our body confidence and feelings of self-worth. The video featured actress and activist Cynthia Nixon reciting the inspiring feminist writing of Camille Rainville, and produced by renowned photographer Claire Rothstein, the film version is essentially ‘a fashion video for the #MeToo generation’. 

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'Be a Lady They Said', dir. Paul McLean (2020) for Girls.Girls.Girls.Magazine, hosted on Vimeo 

The video is a striking portrayal of the conflicting standards imposed on women and their bodies. On my first viewing, I was taken aback by its compelling exposure of the extent to which gendered oppression has taken root within our very identities. In contemporary society, the strategy of many beauty-related outlets is to articulate to woman, through a bombardment of media images, that our bodies are in some way inadequate (Bartky, 1990: 100). Failure to measure up to these idealised standards is often met with a sense of shame, reflecting the ‘internalised patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability’ that women themselves are guilty of narrating (Bartky, 1990: 104).

Photograph taken by Chloe Simpson at the DC Women’s march, published 25 January 2019 on Unsplash, available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/XwrDrY9hjrI

Feminist writers and campaigners have critiqued these dynamics for some time. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, first published in 1991, shows persuasively how women are assigned value in a patriarchal hierarchy, in adherence to culturally imposed physical norms (Wolf, 2002 [1991]: 12). Mona Lloyd defines patriarchy as ‘a system of male power that permeates all aspects of life at all times and in all places’ (Lloyd, 2005: 74). In this sense male power dominates all aspects of female life down to the very core of women’s sense of self and identity. The myth of beauty and its encompassing toll on women is not actually about women at all, but ‘is in fact about male institutional power’ (Wolf, 2002: 13). It is, at its centre, about conditioning women’s behaviour and women’s identity to be based around beauty so that we are vulnerable to male approval for our self-esteem and thus firmly under patriarchal control. 

The consequences of the pressures outlined in the ‘Be a Lady’ video are profound, with anorexia becoming a substantial problem in the last few decades, as well as bulimia, orthorexia, purging, and body dysmorphia. These conditions highlight the existence of a widespread cultural obsession that has consumed many female lives across the globe. The first ten and final two minutes of activist Jameela Jamil’s 2018 interview on Channel 4 News, below, speak to this pervasive cultural emphasis on women’s weight and appearance, reinforcing Naomi Wolf’s claim that although ‘more women have more money and power and scope and legitimate recognition that we have ever before, in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers’ (Wolf, 2002: 10).

Jameela Jamil on banning airbrushing, the Kardashians and her traumatic teens, Channel 4 News 29 August 2019, Youtube.

Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky asserted that ‘femininity is an artifice through which we enact and re-enact received gender norms as a style of the flesh’ (Bartky, 1990: 65).  This mirrors Judith Butler’s argument about gender performativity. According to Butler, to say ‘that the gendered body is performative suggests that there is no ontological status attached to it’ (Butler, 1999: 173). On this view, gender is in fact produced through the stylization of the body, in that the widely accepted norms and ‘styles of the flesh’ associated with the body are what constitute the illusion of gender itself (Butler, 1999: 177-8). The Cynthia Nixon video similarly alludes to gender being nothing more than a social construct composed of norms that women have been conditioned to think are crucial precursors to inhabiting a female identity. It highlights that the messages of bodily acceptability we are fed themselves determine the stereotypical ‘beautiful woman’ that we are all encouraged to embody.

In addition, the feminist phenomenological approach of Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal work The Second Sex is helpful in understanding the preoccupation of the video with gendered embodiment and its impact on subjectivity. As Amy Allen explains, de Beauvoir argues that men have assumed the liberated and transcendent position of ‘the Subject’ while women have been ‘compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence’. Iris Marion Young adds that female embodiment is key to this process, ‘the woman lives her body as object as well as subject. The source of this is that patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies’ (both quoted in Amy Allen’s discussion of feminism and power here). This approach concisely exposes the pervasive view in patriarchal society that women’s bodies are the defining feature of their value.

While it has been clear for some time that normative femininity is becoming more and more focused on the female body and more specifically its surmised heterosexuality and physical appearance, the growing power of visual images and social media platforms are adding a new dimension to the issue. Author Deborah Rhodes has argued that those concerned with the women’s movement should pay more attention to the role the media has in characterising women’s issues and the movement itself, as this platform is becoming increasingly sought after as a way of providing the information and images through which we conceptualise our lives (in Gillis and Howie, 2007: 186). The use of social media, in particular, has facilitated a ‘fourth wave’ of feminism and with it a far-reaching ‘call out’ culture challenging misogyny and sexism. Touching on this, the 'Be a Lady' video splices in footage of the disgraced former film producer Harvey Weinstein – alluding to the unprecedented power that the #MeToo movement was able to achieve on the back of the global support for the twitter hashtag.

Photograph taken by Elyssa Fahndrich at the Women’s March in Salem, Oregon, January 2018, posted on Unsplash, available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/gizHA4cM3Zs

However, the political impact of social media more generally is debatable. Concerns have been raised about online activism being detached from real-world politics, with the term ‘slacktivism’ coined to describe online campaigns which accumulate wide public support but which do not necessarily address pressing issues or lead to political activity on the ground.  This leads me to one of my concerns about the ‘Be a Lady’ video. Yes, it went viral within days; flashy and glamorous, it is made for a consumer audience. Yet does sharing it on your social media translate into offline political activity against the toxic culture it exposes? Probably not. The multi-billion dollar beauty industries are unlikely to be toppled by one viral fashion video – especially one that in itself seems to propagate some of the stereotypes it claims to be ‘calling out’. And this is another concern about the video: sticking almost exclusively to traditionally thin fashion models means that it severely undercuts its own critique of destructive body stereotypes and objectification. 

The viral hit also neglects the matter of intersectionality, defined by Amy Allen as ‘a framework for analysing power that encompasses sexism, racism, class oppression, heterosexism, and various other axis of oppression in their complex interconnections’. Failure to account for divergent experiences of oppression results in a single axis framework which treats race and gender as an overarching category and makes the experiences of white women the primary focus. Women of colour have always been excluded from the ‘ladylike’ and the video does not challenge this exclusion. While there are some models in the video drawn from other ethnic groups, the norms of appearance cited are primarily those facing white woman, failing to account for the divergent standards that other women may encounter. This once again makes me sceptical of the video’s political worth. For a video ostensibly seeking to help women repossess autonomy over their bodies, it could have included more body positivity and models of different sizes and shapes, as well as challenging a greater range of cultural and ethnic stereotypes about women’s appearance.

These shortcomings are significant. Modern beauty standards discipline all women both physically and psychologically, and we are therefore in need of a framework that encompasses the experiences of women in our diversity before we can begin to re-vision our own bodies and combat the standards inscribed upon them daily. Without that, despite its captivating glamour and the empowering ‘call out’ culture it claims to be advocating, the ‘Be a Lady They Said’ video remains part of the problem rather than the solution.

Click here for the second in the series - Lucy McKenzie discusses the obstacles faced by Senator Elizabeth Warren in her fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

References

Bartky, S.L. (1990) ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, (NY & London: Routledge)

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge)

Gillis, S, and Howie, G. (2007) Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2^nd edition), (Basingstoke: Palgrave)

Lloyd, M. (2005) Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Domination (London: Sage)

Wolf, N. (2002 [1991]) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women,(HarperCollins Publishers)