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Issue #14
There's a word that used to mean something specific, and now it just means “please buy this.”
That word. Empowerment.
It started in places like labor movements and civil rights work. It’s more akin to language about access, agency, and the actual redistribution of power. You empowered someone by giving them a vote, a wage, a seat at a table that had been shut off from them. The word had weight because it described a change in the world, not a feeling about yourself.
Now it sells me a sports bra.
Somewhere Along The Way, The Word Changed Jobs.
I noticed it the way you notice a song you've heard a thousand times before, but suddenly heard the actual words. Empowering leggings. Empowering lipstick. An empowering subscription box. A face serum that doesn't just clear your skin, it empowers you to face the day!
And I kept thinking: empowers me to do what, exactly?
The original word implies an outcome. Power to do something. The marketing version dropped the object off the end of the sentence and kept the warm glow. It's empowerment that asks nothing of you and yet changes nothing around you.
It just wants your card on file.
This Wasn't An Accident. And Yep, It Has A Name.
The industry calls it femvertising, female empowerment advertising, and the term was coined publicly at an ad-week panel in 2014, though brands had been working the angle for a decade by then. Dove's "Real Beauty" launched in 2004 and is widely treated as the first of its kind. Always' "#LikeAGirl" turned a playground insult into a Super Bowl moment in 2015. Nike, Pantene, Under Armour, and Gillette all picked it up because it worked.
As someone in marketing and a woman, here's where I see both parts of this tactic: it works even when you can see it working. Researchers interviewing Gen-Z women found they'd warm to an empowerment ad while openly distrusting the company behind it.
"I'm cynical about their work practices, but it was a really relatable advert."
Skepticism and susceptibility live in the same person at the same time. The ad doesn't need you to believe the brand cares. It just needs the word to do its quiet work before you finish the sentence.
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Here's The Trick The Word Pulls
Real empowerment is inconvenient for a brand. If a company actually empowered you, you might need less of what it sells. You'd be harder to upsell. The whole machine runs better on a feeling than on a fact.
So the marketing version quietly swaps power for self-esteem. "Love yourself exactly as you are," and then, in the same breath, here's the thing to buy that fixes the part you were told not to worry about. The problem and the solution arrive together, wearing the same friendly font. You're not being sold a product. You're being sold permission to feel good about buying it.
After about 2018, researchers tracking this even gave the later phase its own name, commodity feminism, the love-your-body, treat-yourself register that kept the empowerment vocabulary while quietly walking the meaning back toward the same old standards. The words got more progressive. The job stayed the same.
The Word Didn't Die. It Got Rented Out.
That's the part that stays with me. "Empowerment" still sounds like it means something, which is exactly why it's useful. A dead word can't sell anything. A word that almost still means what it used to, well, that's the perfect tool. You hear the echo of the real thing and feel its warmth, and the brand gets to stand in that warmth without having done anything to earn it.
Borrowed power, pointed at a checkout button.
I'm not even mad at the leggings being sold to me online. They might be great leggings. I just want us to keep the receipt on what that word costs, before it got marked down, to mean here's how you should feel about spending money.
Real empowerment was always about being able to walk away from something. Funny that the marketing version is engineered to keep you coming back.
Till next Wednesday,
~Aliya