Today's world needs to change a lot. We have a lot of areas in which we are lacking; Humans rights, feminism, racial equality, economic stability, etc. are a few. Many people work round the clock trying to solve these issues by conducting research, protesting, or debating others to change their opinions and perspective about things. On the other hand, we have the capitalist progressive.
The capitalist progressive is someone who states that they completely support the causes championed by regular left wing activists. Some even truly believe in those ideas! However the actions they take to acheive them are so ridiculous that they become a surreal parody of a distopian capitalist society.
How does one become a feminist? Simply defined, believing that men and women should hold the same rights and be treated equally by society at large. I don't think you need to fight for this cause in order to call yourself a feminist; Simply believing in it is good enough. However, please don't take actions that counteract the goal of feminism and then call yourself a feminist. Those type of people piss me off. And there are a lot of them.
I'd like to call such people faux feminists. They call themselves feminists, but their actions hurt the cause. Most of faux feminists' actions involve consumption of goods, which means that corporations have fully taken advantage of the phenomenon and managed to exploit people for profit while simultaneously being able to call themselves feminist.
Let me describe the things that piss me off. Doing exaggerated steoreotypical gender based actions does not empower anybody; It simply provides you an excuse to do things that society would like you do anyway. My critiques in this post will mostly include actions by women, however that does not mean I condone the macho bullshit by men. I'm talking about bright pink clothes and fashion accessories claiming to liberate the person who wears them. Just because a product has feminist wording on its branding does not make it feminist. Some people claim that they just wear those products simply because they like it and not because women are expected to like the color pink relatively more compared to men. Well if that's the case, I see a lot more pink in feminist products than I see in normal products in general. Does that mean that women are biologically coded to like the color pink more than men? While I don't know the true answer to that question, it's highly likely that women were just culturally pushed to like pink, and that makes the color something the movement should be against. Pink feminist products disgust me.
You can also see faux feminism in the way products are advertised; Companies want to sound attractive to the faux feminist because feeling like you are changing society while buying a product you want to a great deal! Guess how you can help solve the problem of body acceptance and the portrayal of unhealthy and impossible to acheive body shapes in media? Buy Khloe Kardashian's Good American Bodysuits!
Love your curves, ladies!! Love your body! Love your selves! And most importantly, let's continue to empower one another!"
I could go on and on about how this is super surreal. Solve feminist issues by consuming products designed to look appealing to the opposite sex. Is this comfortable? I have no idea, but definitely isn't feminist. You're paying money to a millionare and supporting the abuse of cheap labor in developing countries; You are worsening humanity, not bettering it by purchasing such a product.
Here's an interesting quote.
The idea that purchasing itself was a feminist act became a key tenet of emerging marketplace feminism, an embrace of feminism that’s depoliticized, decontextualized, and less about ensuring equal rights for women than about empowering them as consumers,” Zeisler writes. “Empowertising builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is a constant source of empowerment.^fn
Empowertising. It's a perfect word. Telling people to feel good about themselves by selling them something they don't need to feel good about themselves. However, they make sure that the person they are advertising to will need it in order to acheive the feel good status that is advertised! Brilliant!
There are a lot of things to do in order to improve the world, but consumption and capitalist actions aren't going to do anything except making the world a worse place to live in.