Of course I know feminist empowerment isn't about shoes - I write the adverts that tell you it is

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox

Get our free View from Westminster email

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Every so often, a sea change is detected in the ads you see on the Tube, on the TV, in your social feed. One month they’ll all be talking about a sporting event, the next they’ll be trying to push a holiday with only limp ties left to religion onto you in the hope of getting you to buy something. But overarching all of these will be one crystallised thought – one underlying social current that is directing what we see, read, buy, do. And right now that current is empowerment.

Pinning down and capitalising on that current is big business for the agencies – advertising, PR, marketing, print, media – who are vying for client dollars. I know, because I work in the business.

Many of you will have seen or heard of the revolutionary #LikeAGirl advert from Always – one of the providers of sanitary products – that looks to turn the derogatory phrase ‘like a girl’ on its head and thus empower a new generation of girls and young women into realising their full potential. ‘Powered by Always, women can do anything’ is the subtle marketing takeaway that some bright ad spark will have used to sell this in to their boss, and this theme obviously sold well. The original ad was basically Don Draper’s wet dream – Obama mentioned it, the media loved it, it won awards left, right and centre and other agency creative bros have been stroking their hipster beards ever since on how they can replicate it. You can see the full details of the ad from the horse’s mouth here. How did the brand in question celebrate to its fans? By releasing follow-up content to mark International Women’s Day.

Naturally, to die-hard true feminists (of which I am one; I set my bra on fire every morning before taking a selfie with it), any brand jumping on the back of a relevant yet maligned social movement to try and flog us tampons could be seen as crass. And aside from being a flash in the pan, a backlash has firmly begun against the brand-owned, image-led idea of empowerment that is pushed by advertising.

From a girl throwing a pitch to a woman proudly flaunting her (in-proportion) Photoshop-free curves, female empowerment has been beautifully and successfully bastardised by the advertising industry to a point that we’ve actually forgotten that they did this to us in the first place.

Hadley Freeman’s recent piece for the Guardian loudly savages the generation that have mistaken a disposable income for empowerment, neatly bypassing her previous role as a fashion journalist (her own work will have doubtless involved endless schmoozing with fashion PRs). And she has somewhat of a point: there’s a plethora of pieces around at the moment suggesting that money really is the only way forward for feminism, whether that’s via the latest pair of Manolos or permeating an article about “the fuck-off fund”, a savings account women should supposedly keep in order to keep themselves safe from domestic abuse and sexual harassment at work.

Women are not stupid. I would like to believe that women are not dumb enough to actually buy the mentality that ‘can you be a feminist and vajazzle?’ should be taken as a rallying call to have the latter or you aren’t the former.

Yet the number of puff pieces and bad opinions turned out deriding women who are vacantly obsessed with their own image when they should really be protesting FGM continue apace, despite being so full of hot air they’re basically big #HeForShe balloons. Women (and men, I’m sure) across the world ponder long and hard about why the younger generation are obsessed with selfies now more than ever, as my generation of women aggressively take back their image of empowerment (or just their image) by splashing their faces all over social media. Are they annoyed because they don’t want to see how good our lipstick looks? Or are they annoyed because we haven’t attributed a branded hashtag to our image?

A woman taking a selfie when she’s got #strongmakeupgame that day isn’t what’s killing female empowerment, because no woman alive would naturally attribute a selfie to saving the world.

It’s the ‘vapid, seeking validation, desperate’ woman who dares to post a selfie who gets the blame for the shallowness of society, however, while the makeup brands tagged in the photo sit back and let the likes roll in. Just look at the #NoMakeUpSelfie started off by Cancer Research – it rolled in £8m for the charity, and the only people facing criticism were the women who involved themselves.

We are tearing each other apart in a gladiatorial online battle while the team in advertorial count the dollars thanks to eyeballs and search terms on a term that we created and they stole.

And as a marketer, a selfie-taker, and a life-long cynic, I can tell you that we should be smarter than this.

Lola Carson is a pseudonym