I counted.) Hegemony aside, this is a useful lens through which to view YouTube videos. The words situate or situated appear more than 20 times. As a result, concludes Banet-Weiser, “The contrast between an offline empowerment that is ‘real’ and an online empowerment that is ‘fake’ is ultimately beside the point.” The same things that make the Internet so socially transformative-its openness, its focus on entrepreneurship-also “provide the logic for the girl’s self-branding,” situating them evermore into a “hegemonic gendered consumer culture.” (As should be clear, this is an academic book. Living as they do inside of a world filled with commercial narratives, little girls work with what they’ve got. Meaning that all that empowerment and self-expression is happening within the larger context of big brands and big money. That’s noble and all, but it’s happening because they want to get some soap on those boobs.
The folks who want you to sell that soap also want you to feel great about your boobs, even if they’re not aspirational boobs. “Ambivalence” here is almost a synonym for “having it both ways,” but it’s key to remember that “both ways” is a fiction. “When Dove criticizes the beauty industry for damaging girls’ self-esteem through a very visible, social activist campaign that is funded through the selling of beauty products,” concludes Banet-Weiser, “the relationship between political (read: individual) empowerment and consumer culture is intricately, and often ambivalently, configured within the contours of the brand.” By which she means: Dove wants a feminism that sells soap.
The book leads off with a somewhat perfunctory breakdown of the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, in which perfectly attractive women who occasionally enjoyed cupcakes were encouraged by Dove Soap to stop thinking of themselves as hideous hag-beasts but rather to esteem themselves and, not coincidentally, to celebrate their unique and perhaps curved bodies by cleaning them with Dove.
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