Why the Komen/Planned Parenthood Breakup—While It Lasted—Was Good for Feminism

http://www.thenation.com/article/166072/why-komenplanned-parenthood-breakup-while-it-lasted-was-good-feminism

My delight at the Susan G. Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood breakup lasted a glorious forty-eight hours—which is the time it took for the nation’s most prominent breast cancer charity to reverse the decision that it would no longer fund the nation’s most prominent women’s healthcare provider. It might not look like it at first, but Komen’s actions and the ensuing backlash are a huge boon for the feminist movement. The fact that Planned Parenthood will again be eligible for funding in future grant cycles, on top of the $3 million it has raised in the past week, just makes the incident a win-win. But the Komen controversy still has ramifications beyond the budgets of the two organizations: it provided a long-overdue spotlight on the difference between feminism as a brand and feminism as a political movement.

The past decades have seen the rise of a nominally apolitical marketing campaign masquerading as feminism, with Komen merely the most visible symbol. Komen aligns perfectly with what Linda Hirshman labeled “choice feminism”—a moral-relativist approach to feminism that tries to scrub the movement of politics and value judgments in favor of uncritical affirmation of all women’s choices.

In her statement of apology, Komen CEO Nancy Brinker said, “We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics—anyone’s politics.” That’s exactly the fallacy—that somehow women’s health can be narrowed to an apolitical and innocuous agenda. Women’s bodies are the most politicized sites on earth. When women focus on a hyperfeminine aesthetic at the expense of issues of substance, we end up with a hot pink ghetto of goodwill that forfeits the conversation about rights, access and money to the menfolk.

For the past decade, this has been the feminist’s lament: How do we identify the line where feminism becomes a marketing strategy for the very patriarchy it nominally opposes—selling a non-threatening agenda that doesn’t buck the status quo? It’s often hard to tell reclamation from capitulation, and easier to rely on shorthand symbols like, say, the color pink and “you go girl” sloganeering; it’s tempting to assume that everyone’s on the same ideological page. By the time you realize that’s not the case, you’ve already purchased hundreds of dollars of carcinogenic cosmetics and applauded NFL players accused of sexual assault for courageously donning pink shoes.