What is Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand? (FLEB)
START HERE → She’s The Perfect Woman, in the form of a business or a brand.⠀
She’s everything we’re supposed to be in order to be socially acceptable — white, thin, pretty, straight, cis, able-bodied, uber-positive and smiley…⠀
The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand is what our culture insists women embody AND a business blueprint that leverages privilege to create authority over other women.⠀
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
It often looks like “playing big” because we see huge businesses being built using this formula.⠀
But it is actually a form of playing small. ⠀
We have to sheer off our edges and fit ourselves into a box in order to perform socially-acceptable caricatures of ourselves.⠀
And…most of us can’t fit our identities into that box in the first place! So this formula is fundamentally exclusive and oppressive.⠀
IT GETS WORSE: The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand also uses business practices and marketing tactics that are exploitative and oppressive. Injustice is baked in.⠀
FOR YEARS, I’ve been raising awareness about how the standard online business practices we’re taught to use by Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brands are oppressive and harmful — and at odds with the empowering outcomes we’re trying to create.⠀
This is not about individual leaders or business teachers.⠀
This is about our standard practices, policies, and norms.⠀
We absolutely have the power to do it differently.⠀
And…that doesn’t mean our businesses will suffer. There are many creative, profitable ways to do our businesses differently so we can FLOURISH — personally, and collectively.⠀
For the next 10 days, I’m teaching a free course on Instagram. I’ll map out destructive, oppressive business practices that are the NORM but need to change…⠀
…and I’ll share CULTURE MAKING business practices and CULTURE MAKING marketing tactics that can help you build a thriving business while creating a positive social impact.⠀
We’re going to bake our social justice principles into our businesses…and change everything.⠀
Read Next
