FLEB Marketing Tactic #3 Male Approval
Day 3 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⠀
Problematic FLEB Tactic #3:
Highlight Male Power & Approval⠀
Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brands (FLEB) often make husbands, male partners or their access to male celebrities an important part of their brand.⠀
Why? To manufacture authority (see lesson from Day 1). Having a high-status man in their corner demonstrates their power.⠀
It also reassures other (straight) women that they can build financial power without compromising their attractiveness & value to men.⠀
AND: their brand philosophies are often based on a sexist gender binary that constructs women as intuitive/emotional & men as logical/structured. So whenever they want to teach about building systems or structures, they need to trot out The Man. ⠀
(I’ve seen a FLEB promote their husband as a coach to their women clients using the job title “Chief Masculinity Officer”!!!!!!)⠀
And…pffffffft to all of this. ⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Culture Making Business Practice #3:
Build and Highlight Our Own Power⠀
This culture-making business practice is possibly the easiest, and the hardest.⠀
Easy: just refrain from doing this :)⠀
Leveraging or displaying proximity to male power – if we can even access such a thing! – reinforces the patriarchal norm that only grants some women power & social approval as a function of their relationship to men.⠀
Harder: We’ve got to build our own generative power, display it & share it
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
In other words: Get visible for YOUR ideas & YOUR work.⠀
Also: interrogate (and retire!!!) the gender binary (masculine/feminine) for how it erases all other genders & reinforces sexist beliefs.
