– INTRO –
Akane Kanai Feminism is about being a ‘force for change’. That’s from British Vogue 2019. We already know from second-wave feminism that ‘sisterhood is powerful’. But the vibe of what that means changes when it’s also a slogan on a Dior T-shirt.
Beyoncé reminds us that it’s not about being ‘bossy’. It’s about being ‘the boss’. Or, if you can’t technically be a boss – the idea is that you should still be a ‘strong woman’, in inverted commas. The kind that works their way up and doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
As I explore in this episode, I think the recent proliferation of these ideas and representations, can sometimes unintentionally narrow what counts as a ‘good’ feminism. Narrow ideas that don’t necessarily reflect feminists’ everyday lives; the constant pressure they face from media, including social media; or give them a break when they’re not ready to smash through glass ceilings.
My name’s Akane Kanai and this is Feminist Not Fearless, the first in a 4-part mini-series on contemporary feminist culture and social media. Over the next four episodes, I’ll explore some of the pressures and complexities facing contemporary feminists online.
I’m a researcher and teacher of identity, media, and popular culture, based at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, situated on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations.
Over the past three years, I began a nationwide project with young feminists in Australia. I undertook focus groups with social media-engaged feminists aged 18-28, with two separate follow-up interviews, spaced a year apart afterwards. They’ve shared their lives and feminist social media with me, and in this podcast, I want to share their stories as a means of considering what it means to be a feminist now.
Note: you’ll hear their real voices, but I don’t use their real names.
– PART 1 –
Sarah Banet-Weiser, a professor based at the Annenberg schools USC, that’s University of Southern California, and UPenn, talks about this trend to empowerment that I’ve mentioned. In the aftermath of the #MeToo resurgence in 2017, she writes, we see feminism, incredibly, being popular in some ways. In contrast to the days of feminists often being seen as social outcasts in the 70s and 80s, and even when I did undergraduate in the early 2000s, – we see in the past decade, actors like Aziz Ansari suddenly making it their mission to ‘come out’ as feminist, as feminist becomes associated with ‘good things’: what Sarah calls ‘competence and capacity’.
Clip: ‘Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal because I’m worth it. I’m worth it. You’re worth it. We’re all worth it.’
Akane Kanai So, this popular feminism coincides with the growing commercial viability of feminism which has particularly taken off since the 1990s with the emergence of ‘girl power’ as a message you heard in schools, advertisements, pop culture. Feminism could be sold, because it was associated with girls’ and women’s growing confidence, power, and leadership. And who doesn’t want confidence?
Shani Orgad What we began to notice was this rise of imperatives to confidence and also related dispositions like resilience or self-love, which were distinctly addressed to women.
Akane Kanai That’s Shani Orgad, a researcher at the London School of Economics. Together with another researcher, Rosalind Gill, she’s recently published a book called Confidence Culture.
Shani Orgad Rosalind and I had been working across different fields. So Ros was working on intimate relations, on body image. I worked before on issues of women in the workplace, motherhood. And what we were encountering was very interestingly, very much the same messages, almost often literally word for word where the premise of this culture, also ‘cult’ as we call it, was that there’s a supposed crisis that is peculiar to women, which is the product of our perfectionism and our self-doubt. Which is supposedly that’s the kind of key that’s holding women back in public life.
Particularly, we were troubled by the focus which seems to be consistently remaining on changing women, changing girls, rather than critiquing the forces that are raged against us that produce the lack of confidence in the first place.
Akane Kanai So what Shani is saying that is that ‘confidence culture’ should be about empowering women, but in fact it’s more about changing them.
Shani Orgad Yes, exactly, and it’s about exhorting women to work on themselves, improve themselves, change themselves. And as we document in the book, it’s a 24/7 work of self-monitoring through apps that remind you to breathe and to love yourself and to be compassionate towards yourself and through workplace programs that tell you how to be more confident, how to be more authentic, how to be more forgiving to yourself. And all of this is very much internalized and is predicated on turning inwards, on very much kind of, again, fixing the woman rather than fixing the world
So what we argue is that while it is couched as a feminist intervention and a feminist effort, confidence culture, ultimately what the type of feminism it builds on and promotes is one that, instead of holding the institutions and the structures of contemporary life to account, what it does, it blames women ultimately for their difficulties or for their subordinate positions for not being confident enough.
Akane Kanai So, there’s a difference between widely available commercial messages about confidence and how people might actually be feeling. You might sing along to Beyonce’s ‘I’m That Girl’ but this might be a far cry from actually embodying that ‘fearless feminism’.
But part of the reason I wanted to do this episode was that I was seeing this pressure to be empowered coming from a different source as well. It wasn’t just reruns of Khloe Kardashian’s ‘Revenge Body’ that was suggesting all you needed was confidence to be successful in life.
I was seeing a lot to do with social media mantras to ‘call out’ and ‘speak up’; something that actually requires quite a lot of confidence, not just in doing the speaking part, but having the confidence that you’ll actually be heard and listened to.
This is because on social media things tend to be binary. If you don’t speak, this means you’re being silent, according to the logic, and this means you are being complicit with power.
For example, there’s the catchcry ‘Silence is Violence’ which exploded in popularity following the 2020 resurgence in visibility of Black Lives Matter. Not only was this on placards at protests, but also remediated thousands of times through social media on infographics, and memes with cute text.
So, I mean of course, being against police brutality is something you can be clearly against, but, what if the story is more ambiguous? What if you’re working your way through your ideas, and you don’t know the full background of a very complex story? Is it that easy to be confident enough to put yourself out there online?
– PART 2 –
Akane Kanai I’m speaking with Khadija. She’s 18, has short hair, and refers to herself as a ‘mixed kid’, with a Malay mum and white dad. She’s psyched to be part of my research. She first participated in a group workshop I ran online on Zoom, before agreeing to be interviewed. I asked her what she thought of the group discussion.
Khadjia Yeah, I thought it was so good. I was really nervous going into it because I thought, oh, I’m like super young. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t have much to contribute, but, even if that’s true, getting to hear other people’s perspectives and stuff was like amazing. And it was, it was really good.
Akane Kanai Khadija went to an Islamic school as a kid, but now identifies as a secular Muslim. She told me in school she was always challenging certain practices.
Khadjia Like I would get into arguments with our religious leaders about certain things that I disagreed with in Islam where women would like stood behind men in prayer, that sort of thing. And I was just, I don’t get it. Why. And they just couldn’t explain it to me. They were like, oh, like really weird, like almost gross reasons. Like, oh, guys will get distracted if they’re behind women in prayer. And I was like, oh, that’s really gross. Um, and it didn’t speak to me what Islam should be. And then since then I don’t think I knew what the word feminism was until like grade eight, like 2015. But, I feel like I’ve been a feminist since I was like three or something.
Akane Kanai But now, growing into and thinking about the woman she wants to be, Khadija feels somewhat more unsure about what to challenge, what to ask, and how. She is heavily into Instagram and TikTok and learns a lot about feminism that way, but feels she still doesn’t ‘know that much’, as though feminism should be something that one ‘knows a lot about’. And she’s scared to ask questions.
Khadjia I do feel that online, I don’t personally engage because there is like, there’s so much criticism if you don’t know something, or if you don’t quite understand something and you ask them for help, you, there is so much criticism and shame in that, even though there shouldn’t be because learning is an experience and it’s a shared experience for everyone to contribute to. So having conversations with people, it’s the way to come to conclusions and understand things.
Akane Kanai She’s on TikTok a lot. She watches a lot of videos, videos that are informative for her, about things like how men avoid domestic labour by feigning ignorance, or how white people talk but don’t listen. But when she sees the fallout in the comments, she doesn’t dare raise any questions about this content. Khadija luckily has a trusted sister.
Khadija So when I’m with my sister, I’m like, oh, did you hear about this? I don’t really understand it. And then we can have a conversation and come to a conclusion and understand it better. And it benefits both of us, whereas online, it’s not so comforting. It’s, it’s more of a scary place to be vulnerable in that way.
Akane Kanai Khadija’s sister is her main confidante. She’s two years older. And Khadija doesn’t have that many other people she can talk these things through with – not at her job, where she works in admin. Not with her friends from school. She’s really different to them she’s found out. There’s a whole world out there of feminist knowledge she’s aware of but finds difficult to really work through.
Over and over I was struck by the wide range of emotional dispositions of my feminists, who volunteered to participate in my project as feminists who actively engaged with social media culture. More so than the ‘social justice warriors’ you see referred to in clickbait article titles, I myself was sometimes surprised by their need for reassurance that they weren’t alone in what they were thinking and feeling.
Let me now turn to Natalia, for example. Natalia’s in her last year of undergraduate studies of social science. She’s in her early twenties, white, very polite, and apologises if she ever interrupts me in our interview. She contrasted the kind of browbeating you get in comments online, both from feminists and antifeminists, with the relief she feels when she’s in class at university. When her lecturers and tutors would validate the kinds of thoughts and feelings she would have, this really mattered to her.
Natalia When people with lots of authority are saying the same thing, it just feels good, like, okay, I’m not like crazy. I’m not just thinking this. It’s like actually facts. I think it just gives you more confidence in what you’re saying.
Akane Kanai Natalia needed the confidence promised by the confidence culture Shani and Ros have talked about; not empty commercial promises, but those fostered in the civil society in which she was embedded.
This was also true for Bree, a young white woman from rural Australia, in her mid-20s, now working in Melbourne. Bree had what she called a pretty ‘traditional’ upbringing and had been struggling to reckon through the politics of her own intimate relationships. She had started finding feminist discussions on romantic partners, opinion pieces, blogs, a couple of years ago when she had been in a bad relationship and hadn’t been in a healthy place.
Bree ‘Just not doing things that you enjoy, like for your own self. Being like when was the last time, like you just did something cause you liked it. Not cause your partner liked it or your mum liked it or your friend asked you to do it. And I couldn’t answer it, like I didn’t know. I didn’t know what my hobbies were, and that’s why I wanted to regain or like even just explore, like what you like doing, what makes you happy’
Akane Kanai As a child of the 90s, that’s me, not Bree, what Bree was saying reminded me directly of a scene in ‘Runaway Bride’ with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Julia Roberts plays a woman who literally runs away from her own weddings because she doesn’t know what she wants and who she is. She doesn’t even know how she likes her eggs done.
Clip: ‘You weren’t being supportive, you were scared! You were so lost you didn’t even know, what kind of eggs you like!’
Akane Kanai But this was real for Bree. She didn’t know where pleasing others stopped and what she liked began. So the feminist blogosphere in terms of advice on relationship breakdown was really useful for her.
I was happy for Bree that she was able to connect with a political orientation, one that illuminated how what she had been going through was a gendered social pattern that wasn’t necessarily serving her.
But just finding information online isn’t enough. You need more than this to really work through a shift in your perspective and your identity. Because Bree was still struggling. She was feeling confused and now felt the pressure to seamlessly adopt stringent feminist standards for her life, ones that she didn’t necessarily feel confident enough to take on.
Bree I do find it challenging at times because I feel a lot more aware of how I align. Whereas in my past relationship I think I was just consciously doing, like ignorance is bliss, almost. Whereas now I feel a little bit more aware about how I actually feel about certain things. I often feel conflicted, just like aligning with certain things. Like, if I actually feel that way, like does that make a bad feminist or if you feel less about yourself, because of social media or something like that, does that make you a bad feminist?
Akane Kanai Bree described this as a constant internal battle.
So – even becoming more consciously feminist wasn’t just a simple path to personal ‘liberation’. It brought on more personal conflict and confusion. What was the right way to act? Did feeling weak make you a bad feminist? Did falling into old patterns with boys that maybe didn’t serve you make you a bad feminist? The spectre of the all powerful feminist haunted Bree, it created more questions than it answered.
Of course, there were some people I spoke to who did correspond much more to the popular idea of the pathbreaking feminist, ones that were confident, had public Instagram and TikTok profiles, put themselves out there as leaders.
I want to turn now to Kelly, one of my trailblazers. She seems to fit the kind of feminist ‘type’ I was talking about at the beginning of the episode, the one that hurdles over obstacles rather than being knocked down by them.
When Kelly arrives in my online workshop, she introduces herself to others with aplomb. She is a consultant who works in digital. She’s 25, white, private school educated. She’s the kind of person who’s won awards for being a young achiever. Her profile on LinkedIn looks, well, really professional. Her little photo on Google, isn’t a cat, not even a random avatar, it’s her looking like a boss. Kelly doesn’t have time for men in her life that cannot get the basics of bodily respect and autonomy, particularly for women.
Content note here: we’ll start talking about harassment and abuse.
Kelly Like, I came to this organization for the culture. So if you’re not giving me the culture, why am I here, to be as blunt as that?
I don’t care. Like, I’ll take your job. Like, you just, you don’t do that stuff anymore. This is 2021. I just find it hard to deal with people who aren’t at that level now. And then I’m prepared to just get rid of them.
Akane Kanai Out of context, this sounds like Kelly fits the powerful archetype. The kind of corporate feminist you see in movies like Bombshell.
Clip: ‘Ready to go to war?’ ‘Oh yeah.’
Akane Kanai She’s not afraid of the call out. But it’s also important to understand more of who Kelly is.
Kelly is neurodivergent and while she always had a strong group of girlfriends at school, studying itself was really hard. So she didn’t go to uni like a lot of her middle class friends, but started on a service desk when she was 18 where the proportion of employees was about 10% women, 90% men. Harassment became a part of Kelly’s life at that point – Christmas parties, jokes at work, you name it. It wasn’t the start of Kelly’s exposure to gendered violence, but, it became a routine part of it that she learned to anticipate. So, Kelly now has a modus operandi. She’s climbed through the ranks and manages people.
Kelly When I’ve noticed a pattern of behavior, I’ll slightly kind of investigate to see if that person’s okay, which is not good for my own mental health to continually be on the look out for that kind of stuff.
A major reason why I’m doing it is because me as a manager and having that authority and I really don’t care. Like I’ll sit with you and talk about exactly what made me feel uncomfortable to your face and be like, I’m not, I don’t want an apology. I just want to tell you what you’re doing wrong, to fix it. What if that was a grad that was brought on to the engagement and they had no idea what to do and this person kept messaging them and was being creepy? Like I wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone. So I feel like I have to pursue it, stop it, which is taxing sometimes, especially when you have to explain to male colleagues or superiors with dealing with it over and over and over again, that this is not okay.
Akane Kanai Kelly’s response has been, in short, to be the strong one. She’s needed to be the strong one at work, because of what she’s gone through and what she’s witnessed: abuse and assault, and from a young age. She’s needed to be the strong one for others. But presenting a strong, implacable face has taken a bigger toll on Kelly’s mental health. In early 2021in Australia, news broke of a high profile rape in Parliament House that had taken place without accountability.
Clip: [Applause] ‘Miss Brittany Higgins!’ [Applause] ‘I was raped inside Parliament House by a colleague, and for so long, it felt like the people around me only cared because of where it happened and what it might mean for them.’
Akane Kanai This news of assault in the nation’s highest seat of power sent tremors throughout Australian public life. It became a talking point. It flooded my participants’ social media, meaning it was everywhere, it was in their personal lives, it created arguments with their partners, friends, and acquaintances. It mobilised the Australian Women’s Marches in 202. It evidently had a huge personal impact on many of my feminists, like Kelly, who had gone through similar events in their lives. It felt all too real.
It’s 2022. When I catch up with Kelly, she’s left her current firm and has now moved to a different city with her partner. She’s taking a break from all her corporate feminist organising. She’s trying different hobbies. And, she’s on a break from feminist social media.
What speaking to all these feminists has really highlighted to me is that there’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to feminist identity now. We don’t seem to have enough space to account for the fact that most people who are feminist are connecting with feminism because of things that happen to them, in their lives, that also shape how they can present themselves to the world – sometimes with a tough, confident shell, other times seeking the reassurance that they are doing ok.
I wonder if the notion of the ‘ball-breaking’ confident feminist, even though it’s now in a much more palatable, commercial form, is a hangover from stereotypes that sought to contain what feminism could mean and who could be feminist? Everyone wants to be a bit fearless, a bit more confident. But presuming feminism means you’re a particular emotional or personality ‘type’, who does that actually reflect? Who does that help? And who does it silence?
– CREDITS –
Akane Kanai Thanks for listening to Feminist Not Fearless, written by me, Akane Kanai, and supported by Monash University and the Australian Research Council. If you liked this episode, please share it.
Next time on the podcast, we’ll talk about the quandaries of feminist leadership and role models.
Special thanks to Shani Orgad for appearing in this episode, and to my participants for letting us share their interviews. We didn’t use their real names. Emma Baumhofer is the show’s producer. Melissa May is our audio engineer. Music by Ben Hallinan. Natasha Zeng is research assistant on this project. Additional support from Gareth Popplestone and Doug Donaldson from the Monash Media Lab.
Until next time.
Further links:
- Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, Confidence Culture
- Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered
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