Corporate Pandering, Cause Marketing, and Virtue Signaling for Women’s History Month: An Epidemic of Legacy Appropriation
“I’m glad I was raised in the ’50s when a doll was an object, not a role model.” — Kirstie Alley
On the docket for this year, Barbie’s “Inspiring Women” line of appropriated and commodified personas (two dead and one living). This seems to be the hottest new trend in marketing seduction for Women’s History Month. I explored this in part last year with the Koch Industries owned Brawny paper towels, which follows a similar model. For this year’s exploitation of (dead) women’s legacies, there is Frida Kahlo and Amelia Earhart, the latter a perennial favorite, as she was also used for a posthumous celebrity endorsement in the Brawny “Strength Has No Gender” campaign of 2017. It has become what I will call a “legacy appropriation”, an individual species of cultural appropriation.
In the case of Earhart, her image (i.e. her memory, legacy, heroism, mystery, rebellion, independence, etc.) is passed around like a captive ghost serving to accessorize any number of advertising campaigns, from Google to Jeep, Apple to Chick-fil-A. It seems worth considering, during this month of celebrating women and their contributions, how their contributions and personas are brutalized as commodities for the profit of corporate interests. Does this ad from Chick-fil-A dignify the heroic deeds of Amelia Earhart?*
Imagine, (not so) long after you have died, that your image and life’s work is reduced to peddling goods and services to the highest (any?) bidder. If you have the money, you too can ride the coattails of great (deceased) people — or “legends” and “clients” as CMG refers to them — by burnishing your brand image and hawking products for your own benefit.
Earhart, Maya Angelou and Bette Davis are all enlisted for this Allergen ad campaign in absentia. It is, after all, all about your eye health.
What a strange and disturbing form of immortality, to be eternally bought and sold, a perpetual asset to the living whose own lives are enriched by the cachet of the dead. Can there be any doubt that Frida Kahlo would have approved the use of her visage to grace the pre-paid credit cards of Visa? (Kahlo’s descendants certainly don’t seem to.)
Ironically, Kahlo herself was a communist. She joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927 where she met her husband and celebrated muralist Diego Rivera and was thrust headfirst into a tight-knit circle of activists and artists.
The artist, who is famed for her self-portraits, was known for decorating her corsets with hammer and sickles. She was even laid to rest under a communist flag when she died. (Oppenheim)
Would Kahlo, an ardent communist, find her face plastered on plastic to accessorize your wallet a fitting homage? Not likely.
And now, lucky you, there is finally a line of “Inspiring Women” Barbies for the independent, liberated woman. We have become so accustomed to corporations using historical figures to make money under the guise of “celebrating” great people — “Inspiring Women” in this case — that we cannot see or apprehend the violence done to their historical selves. Such usage erases them as actual human beings, they become merely simulations and superficial representations that diminish their contributions and humanity rather than celebrating them.
It is perhaps the most distasteful form of “virtue signaling” or “cause marketing” that has become all too pervasive in this debauched era of late, hyper capitalism. Buy a Barbie and make Mattel money while promoting their “progressive” brand image. Purchase a Barbie to express support for strong women and exhibit that same strength in yourself. Little girls now get to play with a doll of someone whose true gifts to humanity can be reduced to a plastic representation, an objectification in effigy.
The use of coded language obfuscates the true function of such campaigns. “We are humbled” to “honor” frames the discourse as positive, even altruistic, rather than the sophisticated emotional ploy that it actually is.
While I absolutely believe in the spirit of exposing girls to more positive female role models and providing them with examples of diverse, strong women, I reject the notion that a Barbie doll commodifying historical figures in this way is an effective method of doing so. Indeed, the TreeTop Barbie* seems a much more appropriate way to achieve the purported objective — an idea Mattel rejected, though it later teamed with National Geographic to highlight “occupations in which women are underrepresented” — than the kind of legacy appropriation Mattel engages in.
Such public relations/marketing campaigns exploit girls by enlisting them in manipulative messaging directed not at other girls, but at their mothers.** These girls are used in the service of Mattel’s marketing to beguile adult women, seducing them into the false belief that they can empower their daughters, nieces, etc. by simply giving them the right kind of doll.
The Shero line represents about five per cent of Barbie sales. “We use this line to create a halo over the brand,” Lisa McKnight, the senior vice-president in charge of Barbie strategy at Mattel, told me.
A 2016 article by Raina Lipsitz comes to a very similar conclusion:
Talib Kweli wrote the following lyrics about his daughter in his and Jean Grae’s “Black Girl Pain”:
“My pretty black princess…bought her a black Barbie/ I keep her mind free; she ain’t no black zombie.”
The song is a tribute to black women that advocates for raising black girls to believe they are beautiful and worthy of respect. But I’ve always found those words, while touchingly earnest, distinctly un-revolutionary: why rely on a Barbie doll to smash white supremacy and free your daughter’s mind?
When each year brings a cynical new marketing ploy framed as “women’s empowerment,” it’s hard to retain any patience for empowering-girls-through-dolls-and-makeup. Women and girls need rights and dignity, not better marketing, and besides, these efforts plainly don’t work: there is no evidence that eating disorders, which have been linked to unrealistic standards of thinness in the media, are on the decline or that women feel better about their bodies than they did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
An unlikely ideological ally recently emerged in the form of TV star Kirstie Alley, who, on the subject of Barbie’s new sizes, tweeted as follows: “I’m glad I was raised in the ’50s when a doll was an object, not a role model.”
While Mattel and Barbie sends mothers this empowerment message, whereby they can project all of their fears and anger and hopes and dreams onto the girls presented, Mattel and Barbie operate within a nexus of marketing manipulation that perpetuates so many stereotypes about women that these “efforts” drown in a galaxy of sparkle and glitz directed to the girls themselves. Just look at the associated videos on YouTube.
Mattel, like most of corporate America today, also deploys an army of “influence marketers” to further promote their image and products. They do so in a form of astroturfing, where paid “influencers” say good things about their “authentic” feelings and experiences of products/services. Indeed, Barbie “herself” has become a paid “influence marketer”. The ultimate consequence of such corporate image management is to fetishize and anthropomorphize brands; to project onto them human attributes, feelings, emotions, concerns, desires, hopes and dreams (“corporations are people”), in the same way we do the objects they produce. But, this is all an illusion.
Ironically, even the Koch brothers funded Heritage Foundation has published a commentary cautioning that such corporate virtue signaling can backfire, though the writer James M. Roberts, Research Fellow For Economic Freedom and Growth, aimed most of his ire at the impositions “progressives” want to place on Western corporations. His “key takeaways”:
1. The progressive activists who head many of the world’s biggest companies like linking their products with social-justice goals.
2. Western corporations have historically been the backbone of economic freedom.
3. Progressives want to impose on companies a “triple-bottom-line” obligation.
What he gets wrong, or fails to identify, is that it is the “progressives” who are all too often complicit in the very circumstances they (we) seek to change. But, that is, in the final analysis, why the commodification of culture is so insidious and the ideology of capitalism so invisible.
Such corporate “cause marketing” and “virtue signaling” manipulation erodes our ability to think clearly about the political, social and cultural reality we seek to mold. It is anathema to the very concept of citizenship. The apathy and passivity it stimulates rejects those obligations that are the very right to citizenship. The “Market” seeks to create nothing more than consumers, while simultaneously fostering the belief in an illusion of citizenship through our “choices” as consumers. It is a manufactured false equivalency that replaces active, rational political engagement, with passive, emotional product consumption. It is “empowerment” through shopping. It is a masterful deception that mesmerizes and stupefies us all into a comfortable complacency and complicity.
We live in a world where every facet of culture is commodified, including human beings, living or dead. Celebrities will sell themselves into a system of commodity exchange and then celebrate/promote their own commodification. They will encourage others to participate in selling themselves in the same system. Ibtihaj Muhammad, who also got her own Barbie, seeks to nominate and recruit none other than Malala Yousafzai for her very own Barbie this year.
She hopes that this is just the start of more inclusive representation within the doll market and knows who she’d like to nominated for a Shero doll next year. “When I found out I was the first woman in a hijab, I thought for sure Malala Yousafzai would have one,” she said. “I think it would be cool to have Malala have a Barbie doll… her story line in general would be great to teach our kids today. I’m gonna tell Mattel to streamline that. I’ll be the agent on that.”
I am sorry, but no one needs a Barbie doll to “teach our kids today” about great women. Great women do not need dolls to convey their messages or their legacies. It is time to wake up from this stupor we have been lulled into and stop buying into this counterproductive, detrimental, and dehumanizing materialism and marketing.
“I’m excited to just partner with a brand that I know honors powerful women who are breaking barriers and whose sole goal is to impact the future leaders of tomorrow,” Muhammad tells PeopleStyle. “To be included in this conversation is very humbling and I’m over the moon about this whole thing.”
This is sadly misconstrued. Barbie is a brand whose sole purpose is to MAKE MONEY. And you are being paid so that Brand Barbie can convince more women to buy more dolls, that is all. That so many in American society are incapable of understanding this is of grave concern if we are to truly free ourselves and create a world that embraces equality and justice for all.
To Frida and all of the Legends whose memories we abuse and denigrate so we can accessorize our identities, I am truly sorry.
END
Update 4/11/2022: “The legal battle between the Frida Kahlo Corporation and the artist’s heirs over ownership of her brand has ended in the United States.
In 2018, the Frida Kahlo Corporation filed a complaint in a U.S. District Court for Southern Florida against Kahlo’s great-niece, Maria Cristina Romeo Pinedo and her daughter, Mara de Anda Romeo, accusing the two of trademark infringement.
The long-simmering dispute between the two parties was aggravated following Mattel’s release of a Barbie doll depicting the late Mexican artist. Her relatives argued in a Mexican court that the company did not have license to use Kahlo’s image for the series of toys which honored inspiring women in history. A judge ruled in their favor and ordered the toymaker and department stores in Mexico to halt commercializing the doll.
In his ruling, Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. stated that that litigation in Florida “would be burdensome for the Defendants — two individuals who both reside in Mexico City and have no connection to Florida.” He added that “Florida’s interest in this dispute is minimal. While the Plaintiffs allegedly have an office in Florida, there has been no showing of the impact of the Defendants’ alleged infringements in Florida to raise Florida’s interest beyond a generalised interest in enforcing federal law.”
[Update 2/23/2020 ]: Well, coincidentally, Billie Jean King has been added to the “Inspiring Women” line (released 2/19/20), though the likeness is far from her actual appearance. Interestingly, no mention of her sexual orientation or role in gay rights.
The “Ages” section of the Frida doll has been changed to “6+” from “Adult Collector”.
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*TreeTop Barbie was the idea of biologist Nalini Nadkami, which “was designed to inspire youth – especially young girls – to become aware of the field of the forest canopy.”
**The Barbie website specifically identifies the “Inspiring Women” line as developed for “Adult Collectors”.
[Update: 2/23/2020] It appears that this designation has now been removed, though it still appears on the “Pre-Order” page for some of the Inspiring Women Series.
Additional critiques:
A fight has emerged over the use of Frida Kahlo’s likeness, and I for one hope that Frida’s descendants are victorious!
TreeTop Barbie and push back from Mattel:
