Have you ever seen men go band for band with each other about anything besides the most popular mediocre male sports team? I didn’t think so.
When women are the driving force of pop culture, they’re the most valued assets to producers and creatives alike. Fangirls are the backbone of pop culture from the box office to the checkout counter.
Let’s start with the numbers. Right off the bat, women are responsible for 85% of consumer spending in the U.S. alone. If the majority of consumer spending is by women, that makes them the most valuable group for producers to appeal to.
Furthermore, since women are the driving force behind production and sales, producers often aim to create products women will want to buy. While this can be good, it has also been used to take advantage of women.
The concept of companies exploiting women’s insecurities is unfortunately not a new concept. Time and time again, producers have created a problem to sell women a solution and profit from their hypothetical “shortcomings.” While the hold women have on consumer spending has been used negatively, there’s been a shift in how other facets of pop culture represent women.
With the rise of a female-dominated consumer base comes the rise of the control that women have over what becomes popular. Take the box office, for example.
The “Barbeheimer” trend referenced July 21, 2023, when two of the most anticipated movies of the year, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, released on the same day.
Many speculated that this trend started due to the vast differences in tone between the two movies, with Barbie taking on a more lighthearted and fun tone to address feminist topics, contrasting Oppenheimer’s somber biopic nature.
While the Barbenheimer trend grew in popularity across various social media platforms, the idea of these two films shifted. Perceptions of Barbie started to shift into it being a film “for women” and Oppenheimer “for men” across the internet.
While this mentality can be harmful, many women appreciated a film like Barbie that had female main characters who went through universal women’s struggles.
In the end, Barbie grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide in theatres, making Gerwig the first female solo director behind a one-billion-dollar movie at the box office, while Oppenheimer followed behind with over $975 million grossed worldwide.
Barbie is only one recent example of how women shape many facets of pop culture. Women are also majorly impacting the publishing industry. By 2020, female authors wrote the majority of all newly published books, and books published by female authors were more successful than those by male authors on average.
With the rise of female authors, we can observe a connected growth in the number of female protagonists, contrasting the previous male majority. Following this shift to a majority female publishing industry in 2020, U.S. book publishing witnessed a 12.3% growth in sales.
These are just a few examples of how women carry the pop culture. In nearly any business or industry, women have a huge say over what makes the cut and what doesn’t.
Women are utilizing their power to show that without their support, whatever’s being promoted won’t ever be as successful as something that women want. Overall, if you want a guaranteed success, impress the women; they carry the power.
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