Femininity Isn’t Feminism – Martha Barnard-Rae

So Crisp Podcast

If you’ve happened upon my other love-job podcast, Shrews Untamed, you know I don’t shy away from ripping apart what we believe as feminists and peering at the guts inside.

And when your client base is 99% women, as mine is, you have to know some stuff about the way women work, how our brains deal with the story we’re told about being businessowners, what we tend to believe about ourselves when marketing, heck – how we have a propensity to start emails with “I’m just popping into your inbox to let you know…”

AUGHH. If you have a thing about the dreaded “just” word, just wait, I have a new So Crisp episode about that coming next week!

Now, there’s certainly been a shift towards women embracing their own feminine powers when it comes to business ownership, scale, growth, money making, respect demanding. Which is great, fabulous, but there’s a flip side to that too.

Enter the rise of the feminine marketer.

Last week on my other podcast we dipped our toe in the belief systems that mainly middle to upper class, mainly white women are fed – the universe has our back, we can do anything with the right mindset, it’s not the world keeping us down, it’s ourselves. Which is also great, fabulous, only when it’s not.

Because, the fact is, having choices and the right mindset and a belief system that’s somehow modelled on someone’s who teaches this to paying women works for women who are – at their core – privileged.

Martha Barnard Rae and I connected over recommendations for coffee shops in the south of Western Australia, but we decided to do this podcast together because of my socials chatter about putting together that other podcast about Toxic Positivity – and boy oh boy, does Martha have some things to say.

And she’s well situated to say them, when Martha mentioned she’d done her Thesis on high achieving female students and their relationship to femininity from a poststructural perspective.

Perfect So Crisp fodder, heck yes!

The Crisp Takeaways

* Yum *

10.09 – Before post structuralism, there was humanism. And the whole point of humanism was putting people into boxes. And that’s where like the male female binary, became very, very strong.

So at its most simple, post structuralism is a rejection of binaries. So a rejection of the male, female, strong, weak, sort of those binaries were like, women are this and men are this yet, right?

So when we think about femininity, and feminism, we all know that feminism is just people being treated with an equal amount of respect, regardless of their gender, or their sex. But femininity kind of goes along with a lot of those binary ideas. 

12.08 – I was interviewing high school students… and even me as a little mini Martha, when I was in year 12, possibly would not have identified as a feminist because of the word feminism, right? It’s a it’s a word that needs a rebrand.

So so the the girls were very quick to kind of identify the difference between masculine and feminine, and maybe how they were operating outside of that binary. But it was really interesting, because they were very reluctant to identify as feminists. 

This episode is brought to you by the brand new, fresh as a daisy, Crisp Copy Blogathon. Go check it out here.