In an excellent article titled 'Eat,
Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream,'
Joshua Saunders and Diana Barnes-Brown analyze the enlightenment industry and a new genre of literature -- "priv-lit"-- which the authors define as:
"literature or media whose
expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical
enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and
patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial.
Should its consumers fail, the genre holds them accountable for not
being ready to get serious, not “wanting it” enough, or not putting
themselves first, while offering no real solutions for the
astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all
but the most fortunate among us from participating."
Saunder and Barnes-Brown explain,
For decades, self-help literature and an obsession with wellness have
captivated the imaginations of countless liberal Americans. Even now,
as some of the hardest economic times in decades pinch our budgets, our
spirits, we’re told, can still be rich. Books, blogs, and articles
saturated with fantastical wellness schemes for women seem to have
multiplied, in fact, featuring journeys (existential or geographical)
that offer the sacred for a hefty investment of time, money, or both.
There’s no end to the luxurious options a woman has these days—if she’s
willing to risk everything for enlightenment. And from Oprah Winfrey and
Elizabeth Gilbert to everyday women siphoning their savings to downward
dog in Bali, the enlightenment industry has taken on a decidedly
feminine sheen.
It will probably take years before the implications for women of the
United States’ newfound economic vulnerability are fully understood.
Present reports yield a mix of auspicious and depressing stats: The New
York Times, for example, reports that more than 80 percent of the
jobs that have evaporated were held by men, and the proportion of
married women who made more than their husbands rose from 4 percent in
1970 to 22 percent in 2007. That’s not much of a gain, though,
considering that U.S. Department of Labor statistics from 2008 show
women still only making roughly 75 cents for every dollar made by men.
Yet even as reports on joblessness, economic recovery, and home
foreclosures suggest that no one is immune to risk during this
recession, the popularity of women’s wellness media has persisted and,
indeed, grown stronger.
“Live your best life!” Oprah Winfrey intones on her show, on her
website, and in her magazine, with exhausting tenacity. Eat kale. Lose
weight. Invest in timeless cashmere. Find the perfect little black
dress. But though Oprahspeak pays regular lip service to empowerment,
much of Winfrey’s advice actually moves women away from political,
economic, and emotional agency by promoting materialism and dependency
masked as empowerment, with evangelical zeal.
As Karlyn Crowley writes in the recent anthology Stories
of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, Winfrey has
become the mainstream spokesperson for New Age spirituality because “she
marries the intimacy and individuality of the New Age movement with the
adulation and power of a 700 Club–like ministry.” And not surprisingly,
it was the imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club that made Elizabeth
Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across
Italy, India and Indonesia the publishing phenomenon it now is. More
than 5 million paperback copies of the book are currently in print,
though the first printing of the book, in 2006, was a modest 30,000
hardcover copies. The Wall Street Journal estimated that the book
would make more than $15 million in sales by the end of 2007, and the
book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than
155 weeks.
Eat, Pray, Love detailed Gilbert’s decision to leave an
unsatisfying marriage and embark on an international safari of
self-actualization. (Publisher Viking subsidized the “unscripted”
yearlong vacation.) Gilbert ate exotic food, meditated in exotic places,
and had exotic romantic interludes; both culture clashes and
enlightenment ensued, as did Gilbert’s ham-fistedly paternalistic
attempt to buy an impoverished Indonesian woman a house. The book could
easily have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White.
It’s hardly reasonable to demand that every woman who wishes to better
her life be poor, or nonwhite, or in some other way representative of
diversity in order to be taken seriously. But Eat, Pray, Love and
its positioning as an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living
embody a literature of privilege and typify the genre’s destructive
cacophony of insecurity, spending, and false wellness.
Interestingly, the popularity of this media has not only persisted in the face of the recession but grown stronger. The authors suggest that, "if self-helpy is on
the menu, people seem to be buying it, or at least buying into it." They further explain:
The spending itself is justified by its supposedly healthy
goals—acceptance, self-love, the ability to heal past psychic wounds and
break destructive patterns. Yet often the buzz over secondary perks
(weight loss, say, or perfect skin) drowns out less superficial
discussion. Winfrey, again, is a chief arbiter of this behavior: As Stories
of Oprah contributor Jennifer L. Rexroat points out, Winfrey
presents herself as a “de facto feminist” with a traditional American
Dream background who refuses to succumb to wifedom and enjoys pampering
herself. Sometimes that involves espousing the works of spirituality
writers Gary Zukav or Eckhart Tolle, who both appear regularly on her
show. Sometimes it means talking about weight gain and self-loathing.
Sometimes it necessitates buying a diamond friendship pinkie ring.
It’s no secret that, according to America’s marketing machine, we’re
living in a “postfeminist” world where what many people mean by
“empowerment” is the power to spend their own money. Twenty- and
thirtysomething women seem more eager than ever to embrace their “right”
to participate in crash diets and their “choice” to get breast
implants, obsess about their age, and apply the Sex and the City
personality metric to their friends (Are you a Miranda or a Samantha?
Did you get your Brazilian and your Botox?). Such marketing, and the
women who buy into it, assumes the work of feminism is largely done.
Perhaps it’s because, unlike American women before them, few of the
people either making or consuming these cultural products and messages
have been pushed to pursue secretarial school instead of medical school,
been accused of “asking for” sexual assault, or been told driving and
voting were intellectually beyond them. This perspective makes it easy
for the antifeminism embedded in the wellness jargon of priv-lit to gain
momentum.
The authors provide examples of an industry that blogger Sadie Stein describes as "pink-hued, candy-coated girly spirituality."
In fall 2009, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece about well-off
women (and some men) leaving their full-time jobs to meditate in
seclusion for three years, to the tune of $60,000 a year. Another
feature on young, female self-help gurus (their exact qualifications for
guruhood remain murky) charging hundreds of dollars an hour to advise
other women on spirituality and eating well was granted prime real
estate on the front page of the New York Times’ Style section.
Sarma Melngailis, a New York restaurant owner who writes about eating
raw and organic food on the blogs welikeitraw.com and oneluckyduck.com,
promises her readers—most of them women—that if they can just give up
their Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and replace it with her $9 coconut water and
$12 nut-milk shakes they, too, can be happy and healthy. (She’s very
consistent about plugging her products’ ability to combat hangovers and
sexify one’s appearance, too.) The now-famous Skinny Bitch
cookbook franchise plumbs even more sinister depths in its insistence
that women can stop nighttime snacking with the oh-so-simple fix of
hiring a personal chef with vegan culinary training. Actor Gwyneth
Paltrow’s web venture, GOOP,
uses catchy, imperative section headings (“Get,” “Do,” “Be”) and the
nonsensical tagline “Nourish the inner aspect” to neatly establish a
rhetorical link between action, spending, and the whole of existence.
Even Julie and
Julia, the blog that became a book that became a hit movie, is
complicit in spreading the trend. Julie Powell’s story—that of an
ennui-ridden professional whose journey of self-discovery involves
cooking her way through Julia Child—features one-meal shopping lists
whose cost rivals standard monthly food-stamp allotments for many
American families.
The authors argue that contrary to claims of empowering women, priv-lit reinforces historical, patriarchal ideas that women are inherently lesser or broken.
Priv-lit perpetuates several negative assumptions about women and
their relationship to money and responsibility. The first is that women
can or should be willing to spend extravagantly, leave our families, or
abandon our jobs in order to fit ill-defined notions of what it is to be
“whole.” Another is the infantilizing notion that we need guides—often
strangers who don’t know the specifics of our financial, spiritual, or
emotional histories—to tell us the best way forward. The most
problematic assumption, and the one that ties it most closely to
current, mainstream forms of misogyny, is that women are inherently and
deeply flawed, in need of consistent improvement throughout their lives,
and those who don’t invest in addressing those flaws are ultimately
doomed to making themselves, if not others, miserable.
While priv-lit predates the current recession by at least a few
years, the genre’s potential for negative impact is greater these days
than ever before. Today’s “recessionista” mind-set promotes spending
quietly over spending less. Priv-lit takes a similar approach: Hiding
familiar motives behind ambient lighting and organic scented candles,
the genre at once masks and promotes the destructive expectations of
traditional femininity and consumer culture, making them that much
harder to fight.
The enlightenment industry must always cultivate anxieties and problems to market its products to consumers.
The story priv-lit tells is that true wellness requires extreme
sacrifices along economic, family, and professional lines, but those who
make them will be rewarded and attain permanent enlightenment of one
kind or another. (The best recent example is Gilbert herself, since she
was rewarded twice over for her globe-trotting victories in her
spiritual memoir—she married a hot Brazilian man and landed another
bestselling book, 2010’s Committed, as a result.)
Unfortunately, that story is a lie: As one purveyor of high-end
life-coaching services (who, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain
anonymous) comments, “In our line of business, we have a saying: ‘Don’t
fix the client.’” Once mentors teach clients to attain freedom and
enlightenment, they can say goodbye to the high premiums they earn by
telling clients they need more help.
“One of the brilliant parts of the self-help genre as a whole is that
there are these various contradicting threads or themes, all woven
together, and emphasized differently at different times,” says Dr. Micki
McGee, a sociologist and cultural critic at Fordham University and the
author of Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life.
“Self-improvement culture in general has the contradictory effect of
undermining self-assurance by suggesting that all of us are in need of
constant, effortful (and often expensive) improvement. There is the
danger of over-investing in this literature not only financially, but
also psychologically.”
The drive to consume in spite of economic constraints is fueled by the desire to obtain or reflect social status through conspicuous consumption.
McGee, who in researching her own book spent five years immersed in
self-help literature, is quick to point out that this tendency toward
spending for self-improvement is long-standing. But in the current
economic climate, the real financial implications for those who do, or
try to, invest in these ways may be worse than in healthier economic
times, while the spending itself may be growing all the more fetishized.
Since the late 1960s, economic phenomena such as wage stagnation
combined with the increasing costs of housing, medical care, and other
basic necessities have meant that, for most Americans, time really does
equal money. “Increasingly, people who actually have the money to take a
year off and travel in India or go to a thousand-dollar yoga retreat
are in short supply,” notes McGee. “In the context of the recession,
we’re seeing an emphasis on simplicity and frugality, but embedded
within that emphasis is a subtext of consuming more”—imported, she
points out, from contemporary self-help literature of all kinds.
McGee links the persistence of these counterintuitive ideals to the
phenomena of social stratification written about by French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu. In his landmark 1984 book Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu explained that cultural
and aesthetic preferences both indicate and shape class
stratifications, because trends in these preferences seemingly map
individuals’ positions in social hierarchies. As McGee puts it, within
status-quo class systems, “Taste and other types of cultural capital are
emblematic of both status attained and status putatively deserved.” So
those who pray at the altar of priv-lit operate under the false
assumptions that 1) investing concretely ensures attainment of elite
socioeconomic status and 2) having invested demonstrates the deserving
nature of those who do. In times of financial stress—when those who want
exist in even greater proportion to those who have—this feedback loop
may be intensified, because the desired is that much more unattainable
and the consequences of failure, namely the implication that those who
do not get their lives together according to the prescribed boundaries
of priv-lit will end up being so utterly screwed up that they risk
losing their jobs, houses, or independence, among other things—seem that
much worse.
Instead of empowering women, the enlightenment industry cultivates women as one-dimensional consumers.
Priv-lit has transformed Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own” into an
existential space accessed by way of a very expensive series of actual
rooms—a $120-an-hour yoga studio, a cottage in Indonesia, a hip juice
bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The genre is unique in that it
reflects an inversion of its own explicitly expressed value system:
Priv-lit tells women they must do expensive things that are good for the
body, mind, or soul. But the hidden subtext, and perhaps the most
alluring part of the genre for its avid consumers, is the antifeminist
idea that women should become healthy so that people will like them,
they will find partners, they’ll have money, and they’ll lose weight and
be hot. God forbid a dumpy, lonely, single person should actually try
to achieve happiness, health, and balance for its own sake. It’s the
wolf of the mean-spirited makeover show or the vicious high-school
clique in the sheep’s clothing of wellness.
The authors call for narratives that reflect the realities of women's lives.
The truth is that many of us are barely holding on to the modest
lives we’ve struggled to create, improving ourselves on a diy basis,
minus the staggering premiums, with every day we get up, go to work, and
take care of ourselves and our families. Priv-lit is not a viable
answer to the concerns of most women’s lives, and acting as though it is
leads nowhere good. It’s high time we demanded that truer narratives
become visible—and, dare we say it, marketable.
If more women become willing to put aside their fears, open their
eyes to cost-free or inexpensive paths to wellness, and position
themselves as essentially worthy instead of deeply flawed, priv-lit
could soon migrate to a well-deserved new home: the fiction section. And
once that happens, we might just succeed in showing that for every
wealthy and insecure woman who can pony up to reach great heights of
self and spending, there are thousands more whose lives are
comparatively uncharmed, who are happier working with creative and
healthy alternatives instead of spending on what they’re terrorized into
wanting, and whose stories will, someday, be valued for the strength
they communicate, not the fantasies they sell.
Links:
'Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream' by Joshua Saunders and Diana Barnes-Brown, Bitch
'Former Carrie Bradshaws Form Ashram' by Sadie Stein, Jezebel
'Seeing Yourself in Their Light' by Allen Salkin, New York Times
'Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?' by Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara's Blog
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