If you're just choosing choices that make your life better, but not doing anything to advance the station of all women, and make it so all women have those choices, I don't think that's something you can call 'feminist' - you can call it 'self-actualized,' you can call it 'self-empowering' - but it has nothing to do with an ethic of gender equality or liberation for all people.

Writer and Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler explores 50 years of tension between feminism and capitalism in popular culture, and explains how mass media has adapted and amplified the language of empowerment, but in a depoliticized form in service of selling products, and why she's hopeful that a young generation of connected girls and women can reclaim feminism's radical, libratory potential.

Andi is author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement from PublicAffairs.