April 15, 2025

Pretty Lies & Polished Ghosts: Why We Should All Be Pissed About Fake PR Feminism

Spill Tea & Connect

VaginaSauna.com | Commentary

Fake PR Feminism – Every time a celebrity posts a carousel of behind-the-scenes selfies and slaps “#grateful #producer” in the caption, a real storyteller somewhere gets buried.

We’re living in a cultural loop of soft glow lies. Stories built on “close enough.” Careers saved not by craft, but by optics. And worst of all? We applaud it. Loudly. Automatically. Without stopping to ask: who actually made this?

Take Blake Lively.

A woman with a dormant production company, B for Effort, no completed films, and yet an expanding stack of headlines and producer credits. She didn’t originate It Ends With Us. She wasn’t part of the early development. But somewhere between being cast and the film’s release, her name appeared as a producer. Not because she built it. But because legacy by association is easier than legacy by labor.

And the rest of us? We repost the trailer, sigh, “she’s so powerful.” Forget to ask: where’s the actual work?

This isn’t just about Blake, It’s the whole machine, any celebrity “launching” something that never arrives. It’s glamorized altruism with no receipts. A Group Effort Initiatives that feel more like marketing decks than movements. Aesthetic activism designed to sell sunglasses, not shift systems. It’s feminism, but only if it photographs well.

So what do we do about it?

We stop clapping for announcements. Start asking harder questions. Learn to sit with silence and look for the labor, not the lighting. Because real impact doesn’t always come with a press release. It comes with drafts. With missteps. With names you don’t recognize. We call out what’s curated. And we don’t let borrowed trauma stand in for personal growth.

Most importantly, we re-center the invisible. If you truly care about survival stories, give your attention to the people who are surviving without access to publicists, filters, or fallback husbands with production deals.

Because if we keep letting image outperform effort, we’re not just complicit. We’re fans of our own erasure.