FLEB Marketing Tactic #5 Weaponized White Femininity
Day 5 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB).⠀
If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀
If you’re an entrepreneur, download this free 10-day class to help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀
- Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
- Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended⠀
WHAT NOT TO DO⠀
The first rule of The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand is be beautiful and show it.⠀
Get professional, exceptionally flattering photos preferably in luxury locations — some version of this advice is often the first task in a business coaching program or a new product launch.⠀
White women entrepreneurs are trained to use conventional, acceptable femininity and beauty – if they can access or signal such a thing — to get attention, gain audience and construct authority.⠀
But beauty norms in our culture are not universal.⠀
They are specific. They’re white.⠀
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So when white marketing & business coaches use beauty, heterosexuality and glamorous photoshoots signalling hyperfemininity as part of their outreach strategy **and then teach other white women entrepreneurs this success model** they’re leveraging white supremacist beauty norms to create relationship, reputation, reach and revenue.⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Right now, white women entrepreneurs get trained to produce pretty pictures that tell a story of fake authority (privilege).⠀
Instead of doing that, white women can DECIDE the story they want to tell and then create photos that tell THAT story. ⠀
Is the brand is about being a nonconformist? Wear clothes that signal that and use poses that signal that.⠀
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Is the brand about building authentic power? Choose objects and styling that signals that.⠀
What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)
and why is it a problem?
Female
- Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
- Reinforces gender dualist/binary
Lifestyle
- Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women
Empowerment
- Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
- Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)
Brand
- Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
- Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character
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Right now, white women engineer photos and edit photos based on how pretty — aka how close to white beauty ideals — they make them look. Create photos with a different purpose, entirely. Tell the story of THE ACTUAL WORK in the business visuals.
