Andi Zeisler is the cofounder and creative director of Bitch Media, the nonprofit organization that since 1996 has published the award-winning magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. She has written about feminism, activism, and popular culture for Ms., Salon, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Women’s Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Oregon Humanities. She is the co-editor of BitchFest: 10 Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, and the author of Feminism and Pop Culture. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a political Movement

We Were Feminists Once is the sharp and unsettling story of how we have sold out feminism and what we should do when its fifteen minutes of fame have fizzled. Zeisler draws on 20 years of experience covering popular culture from the frontlines of the feminist movement to explain how feminism has become at odds with its original purpose. Pop culture has co-opted feminism and transformed it into something unrecognizable. It has become a choose-your-own adventure story, one in which women can pick the sexiest aspects of feminism, or the ones that support their personal brand identity, and disregard the rest. As Zeisler argues, this trend has the potential to backfire, as it can present the illusion that the women’s rights movement is gaining traction when in fact it is stalled or taking backward steps politically.