The following is an excerpt from Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Take It Back, a new book by communications expert Kara Alaimo.
In early 2019, Gillette posted an online video called “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” which called on men to stop bullying and sexual harassment. Men responded by saying they’d boycott the brand.
“I’m researching every product made by Proctor & Gamble, throwing any I have in the trash, and never buying any of them again until everyone involved in this ad from top to bottom is fired and the company issues a public apology,” one user tweeted.
Rondell Wescott, executive producer of the video, says Procter & Gamble had asked for create a concept that would speak to the #MeToo movement that was roiling the culture at the time. The reaction wasn’t exactly what they’d expected.
Wescott shows me clips of men responding to the video by flushing Gillette razors down the toilet and smashing their shaving cream cans with a bat. And he told me the film’s director received threats against her family and career. “People were like, how dare we have a female director tell men what to do?” he remembers. “This didn’t just become the most disliked ad of the year on YouTube. It became the most disliked ad of all time.”
Remember: This wasn’t a video that called for women to have equal opportunities, or anything else that some men might perceive as taking privileges away from them. It simply called on men not to let people be physically attacked.
“Whereas a lot of ads ask women to improve themselves and explain how to be a better mom or friend, men are not really challenged in that same way in our popular culture,” says Kasey Windels, an associate professor of advertising at the University of Florida. “So calling attention to toxic masculinity and asking for reflection and change really backfired in a big way.”
Wescott says he’s never seen another brand try to send this message to men in an ad ever again. Instead, campaigns by brands telling women what to do — or “femvertising,” short for “female empowerment advertising” — have been one of the predominant ways “feminism” has been represented online. On social media, brands keep deploying the same tactics today, trying to convince women that the path to empowerment is through products.
Here’s how it started. In 2004, Dove launched its Campaign for Real Beauty. The company announced it had commissioned research which found that only 2% of women around the world think of themselves as beautiful and set out to change that. Initial ads featured billboards that asked strangers to stare at the bodies of women who were allegedly not professional models and phone in to vote whether they were “grey or gorgeous,” “fat or fab.”
Brands keep deploying the same tactics, trying to convince women that the path to empowerment is through products.
Over the years, Dove has stuck with the theme. In 2013, it released an online video showing what happened when women were asked to describe their appearances to an artist who sketched them. Then strangers described the same women to artists. The sketches revealed that strangers find women to be much more beautiful than they describe themselves to be. Within a month, it became the most watched video ad ever.
The company’s appropriation of feminism — using it in service of sales rather than to address the structural problems women face — proved astonishingly profitable. Over the first 10 years of the campaign, Dove’s sales increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion.
Seeing its success, other companies were soon spinning out similar campaigns. Pantene launched a 2013 campaign in the Philippines showing the double standards women face. When a man leads, he’s the “boss,” whereas a woman is “bossy.” A man is “persuasive,” while a woman is “pushy.” The company followed up the next year with a #ShineStrong campaign showing that women frequently say sorry in situations when men don’t apologize. Always launched its #LikeAGirl campaign in 2014 to show how girls lose their confidence when they hit puberty. Videos showed what happened when boys and older girls were asked to run like a girl: They helplessly flailed their arms and legs.
“It’s like, wow, OK, here’s an ad that isn’t shaming women or explicitly telling them they’re doing something wrong,” says Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. “They were clearing a very low bar and yet people still lost their minds. Trade publications couldn’t shut up about it, there were whole conferences about it. The ad industry got very high on its own supply.”
Soon femvertisements were ubiquitous. A 2019 study found over 100 different examples. They’re still all over social media. And if you don’t want to practice feminism by purchasing Pantene hydrating glow shampoo with baobab essence, you can buy “feminist” or “girl power” products across the internet. Now women wear feminist t-shirts and think they’re somehow advancing the cause.
Dove’s campaigns aren’t telling us to fight for our rights. They don’t suggest that it’s what’s inside that counts. They encourage us (and everyone around us) to keep looking at our bodies — just (a little) differently.
Femvertisements encourage us to fall for something I call the #feminist fallacy. In 1990, sociologist Marjorie Ferguson called the “feminist fallacy” the misconception that women’s increased visibility in the media would lead to more real-world power for women. Today, popular feminism campaigns on social media have left us with the modern myth that the portrayal of feminism on the internet will somehow lead to an improvement of the lives of women offline.
Instead, in many ways, the opposite has happened. That’s partly because these campaigns keep the focus on our bodies. Dove’s campaigns aren’t telling us to fight for our rights. They don’t suggest that it’s what’s inside that counts. They encourage us (and everyone around us) to keep looking at our bodies — just (a little) differently. “We’re seeing a very specific version of femininity in which women tailor their bodies to be their most beautiful, sexual, available-to-men versions of themselves,” Windels says.
Even the companies that create them don’t buy into their own messages. It turns out Dove photoshopped the women featured in the Real Beauty campaign. And while running that campaign, Dove has continued to sell “firming cream” designed to reduce cellulite. Dove’s parent company Unilever has kept selling Glow & Lovely, a rebranded form of its skin-whitening cream “Fair & Lovely.” For the first 10 years of the Real Beauty campaign, Unilever also sold Slim-Fast products designed to help people diet and lose weight.
What’s more, Windels pointed out, at the same time as Dove has been running these women’s empowerment campaigns, Unilever, its parent company, has been running ads for other brands like Axe and Lynx that suggest, “Hey men, spray on this spray and thin, gorgeous, haven’t-eaten-in-a-week women are going to flock to you and throw themselves at you wearing bras and underwear.”
In the end, the company’s commitment to challenging the shocking beauty standards women are up against didn’t extend beyond its bottom line.
“I don’t think advertising is meant to do anything but what it says on the tin,” Zeisler says. “It’s trying to get you to buy stuff.”
It’s ironic for companies like Dove and Pantene that have long sold beauty products by capitalizing on women’s insecurities to now tell us that our insecurities are our own faults and we need to do the changing by rethinking how we see ourselves. But that’s not the half of it.
Windels points out that femvertisements are all about what women need to do individually: Buy the right products. Feel confident. Be our best selves. Instead of changing the structures and systems that hold us back.
Windels says we won’t solve women’s problems until we address these things — but the good feelings these online videos give us may stop us from doing the harder work that needs to happen in order to change our society. Keeping us busy blaming and trying to change ourselves instead is awfully convenient for a lot of people.
If we used social media to talk about our real problems, we might demand that the auto industry stop making cars designed to save the lives of men instead of women. Women are 73% more likely than men to be severely injured in car crashes and 17% more likely to die in them, because crash test dummies have been mostly designed to protect the body of the average man in the 1970s.
We might demand that companies stop expecting professionals to put in more than 40 hours of work per week — a barefaced form of misogyny that assumes workers can be available round the clock because women are home to take care of the house and children, and largely helps explain why American women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. We might ask for more toilet stalls in public places, since women spend more time in the bathroom because we get our periods, experience pregnancy, and are more likely to bring kids with us.
Of course, if we really wanted to talk about how to solve our problems, we might also mention what men need to do. We live in a world where nearly one in three women has experienced sexual violence or violence from a partner, according to U.N. Women, numbers the pope has called “almost satanic.”
But you’re not likely to see another viral video telling men to stop assaulting their girlfriends and wives. And instead of complaining, many of us have been watching and sharing viral videos telling us to feel beautiful, be confident and buy triple-moisture body wash.
