Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

2. Branding the Postfeminist Self: The Labor of Femininity

|| 51 2 BRANDING THE POSTFEMINIST SELF THE LABOR OF FEMININITY The brand is a gift, and it will set you free. —Self-branding seminar, Los Angeles, 2010 More than a decade ago, on April 14, 1996, a young college student named Jennifer Ringley began uploading a constant stream of pictures of herself on the Web. Filmed from her dorm room, a new photograph was taken every three minutes and automatically posted to a website. The result was a catalog of a young woman’s life, detailing her daily activities: Jennifer with friends, Jennifer studying, Jennifer having sex. Named “JenniCam,” this project attracted up to 4 million views a day at its peak. A few months after she started, Ringley realized the economic potential of this kind of involvement; she began charging for “full” entry into her site. Through automatic credit card payments by means of another nascent Web phenomenon—PayPal— paying customers gained “premium” access to (even) more frequent updates on her life. According to the mission statement of JenniCam.org, Ringley sought to create “a window into a virtual human zoo.”1 Ringley might be said to be the first web-based “lifecaster.” Within the decade, her lone stream of images would become a deluge; as Wired magazine states, “Ringley’s pioneering adventure in self-exposure anticipated the appetite for reality-based 52 || BrAnding the PostFeminist selF voyeurtainment.”2 Why this kind of relentless self-exposure is a “pioneering adventure” is not raised as a question; rather, JenniCam heralded a new era of media production. Indeed, this “appetite” has certainly been whetted; a more contemporary manifestation of “voyeurtainment” occurred in the fall of 2008, when a twenty-two-year old American woman named Natalie Dylan attempted to sell her virginity on the online auction site eBay. According to a press release, Dylan hoped that selling her virginity on the immensely popular website would help pay for graduate school; she has a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and expected to fund her master’s degree program with the profit made from this unique auctioning. “We live in a capitalist society,” she said in a later interview. “Why shouldn’t I be able to capitalize on my virginity?”3 According to Dylan, eBay refused to host her auction (and other sales like it, such as the sale of one’s kidneys or one’s parents) on the grounds stated in the site’s regulations: eBay prohibits the sale of anything “immoral, illegal, or just plain distasteful.”4 Dylan then took her virginity to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, an infamous brothel in Reno, Nevada. According to her own account, she was taking “the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is priceless and [using] it as a vehicle for capitalism.”5 She has said that she has been congratulated by a CEO of a Fortune 500 company for her “entrepreneurial gumption” (although she apparently was not hired by this company) and has argued, using the language of business, that she might even be an “early adopter of a future trend.”6 While it is certainly easy to see Dylan’s virginity auction as a publicity stunt (after all, she announced her sale on the Howard Stern radio show)—or even a kind of performance art, like JenniCam—Dylan’s “project” nonetheless raises questions about what elements of the corporeal can (or should) be saleable. Two years before Dylan’s display of “entrepreneurial gumption,” another woman, Tila Tequila (neé Tila Nguyen) became famous for a different kind of entrepreneurship. In 2006, she had more than 1.5 million “friends” on MySpace, her MySpace profile had been viewed more than 50 million times, and she was receiving between 3,000 and 5,000 new friend requests every day. In an article detailing Tequila’s MySpace fame, Time reporter Lev Grossman wrote, “She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.”7 Tila Tequila has become the exemplar of the use and power of social network sites to create brand visibility. As she herself said, “Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves.”8 Her popularity on MySpace soon led to a record deal with MySpace music and BrAnding the PostFeminist selF || 53 then to a popular MTV reality show, A Shot of Love...