Who gets to play the patriarchy?


Her “I Weigh” campaign is pretty cheesy and her feminism is not particularly revolutionary. But Jameela Jamil is right — celebrities and social media influencers like the Kardashians are damaging to girls and women.
Kim Kardashian came under attack earlier this year for promoting appetite suppressant lollipops on Instagram. Clearly this is something we should criticise her for — Kim is worth $350 million, so why is she hawking eating disorders to teenagers?
I don’t agree with everything Jamil says — and I think there is a fine line between criticising female representation in media and depriving women of their agency to present their sexuality as they please. At some point in the interview, she discusses the way the internet has enabled porn to seep into social media. Discussion of the sex and porn industry’s negative effects should come with support for sex workers, whose social and economic marginalisation is only compounded by a discourse that sees them too as “agents of the patriarchy”.
I also disagree with Jamil’s one-note feminism that shames women categorically (Kim amongst them, but also Beyonce) for the way they dress and present their sexuality. It is a worrying argument that is at its core fundamentally unfeminist to me. It is far too near to the infamous rape-apologist position that rests on the idea that women dress a certain way for male attention (and so are ‘asking for it’.)
But a lot of what Jamil says — particularly her disavowal of capitalist female ‘empowerment’ is spot on. Truly, how much money does Kim Kardashian need?
As ever, there has been a lot of clapback online to Jamil’s interview. I’ve seen one narrative dominate in particular — that as feminism is about women’s choices, it’s misogynistic to criticise Kim’s. But we’re never going to progress if we can’t disagree with other women — it doesn’t make you a bad feminist to call out another woman for perpetrating harm.
And feminism isn’t exclusively about choice. This framing is so limited, and ignores where so much progress came from. It erases some of the movement’s most marginalised and radical elements: the LGBT, women of colour and disabled activists who pushed for a feminism that focused on access as well as choice, collective action over individualism, and working-class and anti-racist politics rather than just the ‘personal as political’.
Feminism shouldn’t be, as Jessa Crispin put it, “a fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor”. Elevating individual choices made by women as radical by default, without regard for what the action is, is useless to me. Limiting feminism to being simply about choice, as if the choices we make don’t affect us or others around us — especially if you’re a public figure with a cult following of young women — is purely vacuous individualism.
The spurning of a collective liberation focus in favour of the politics of choice — and of course, ‘empowerment’, which is the postfeminist word of the day, every day — is highly neoliberal and individualistic. It goes hand in hand with the idea that powerful or successful women should be lauded as feminist automatically for their success, regardless of how many women they hurt getting to the top.
This line of thinking, that sees successful women as feminist by default, calls to mind appraisals of Margaret Thatcher (or even Theresa May) as feminist. We can only consider Thatcher feminist if we sidestep her policies’ effects on working-class women, in particular, and instead limit our gaze to her legacy as a figurehead for powerful women. Symbolic feminism is not good enough.
Or perhaps it is best illustrated, as most things are, by the Simpsons satirising of narrow minded and imperialist liberal feminism that sees Lisa wishing she could meet “the first female stealth bomber — during the Gulf War she destroyed 70 mosques and her name is Lisa too!”
I’m not claiming Jamil is much more radical than Lisa Simpson. But this idea that at some point, the Kardashians became women we should be defending, merely due to them being women, is thoroughly flawed. This reigning politics, which combines the worst facets of liberal feminism (the idea that successful women should be celebrated regardless of their effect on others) and the postfeminist worship of individualistic choice above collective well-being, is far from revolutionary. And there is a collective wellbeing; as disparate as women’s needs and desires are, it’s undeniable that eating disorders, body dysmorphia and self-harming are affected by unrealistic depictions on social media.
The desire to invert all of second-wave feminism, often simply turning it on its head and arguing that the opposite is now true, is exhausting. The doublethink it spawns is exhausting. Women’s prospects have not changed in so absolute a manner to necessite this flip-flopping. And this postfeminist appraisal of individualistic choice and empowerment above all else is predicated on the idea that a fight for liberation is no longer necessary.
It’s possible that some of it is due to the echo-chamber effect of spending hours hearing the same arguments online. It’s easy to forget that most people aren’t on Twitter, and Western society is far more conservative than the views represented in liberal and leftists online enclaves. I’ve seen tweets before making audacious claims such as “girls, it’s okay to be traditionally feminine!” as if the female faces we see on billboards, screens and magazine covers are overwhelmingly those of butch women demanding that, for the love of God, we gain 10 pounds.
Another defense I’ve heard much of over the past few days is that women like the Kardashians are merely symptomatic, or even victims of a patriarchal society, and not responsible for the problem themselves. No one in their right mind is claiming Kim as solely accountable for the way society has been organised for thousands of years. Individuals are not personally responsible for the gender hierarchy. But alleviating all responsibility from influential celebrities is also flawed — it is work that needs to happen in tandem, challenging deep-rooted societal causes but also the individual elements that replicate these harmful notions.
And it is true that we hold women to different, more difficult standards than men. Some have been arguing that someone will exploit vulnerability, so why shouldn’t it be Kim? Capitalist feminism, rooted in exploitation, is not feminism. Men do get off the hook easier — I don’t know if it’s due to male privilege or a sense of betrayal, but considering this an argument for treating misogynistic women the way we treat sexist men is fundamentally flawed. If we ever want to move forward, we have to hold men to account for their behaviour more firmly than ever, not just let their female counterparts off the hook.
We live in a world where sexism, much like racism, homophobia and ableism, is internalised from a young age and coded into everyday interactions — both interpersonal and through the media we consume. We shouldn’t solely blame women for internalising hatred impressed on them year after year, but we should also remember that feminism is the daily work of unlearning our own assumptions and behaviours. And when someone’s failure to do that results in them spawning self-hatred in young girls, we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge that.
And maybe Kim is ‘playing the patriarchy’, whatever that really means. She has been successful in using her sexuality and her family’s celebrity cult status as a performative act, whether it panders to the male gaze or not. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that in the Kardashians, the male gaze finds itself refracted through female eyes. With an overwhelmingly female follower base, women like Kim are not pandering directly to male viewers — they are selling a hyper-feminine ‘male gaze’ ideal to other women.
Regardless, she certainly has made a fortune off it, and maybe the power is in her hands. But whatever empowerment she reaps isn’t passed back to her fans and followers. And in celebrating Kim’s playing of patriarchy, patriarchy is almost definitely playing us.
