by ARWA MAHDAWI
A new Washington DC hotel features pink pool tables, an Empowermint cocktail and Ruth Bader Ginsburg depicted in organic tampons. Its timing could not be worse
All women ever wanted was equal rights and bodily autonomy. Instead we got candles that smell like Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina. We got pink “pussy hats” and £580 Christian Dior T-shirts with “We should all be feminists” written on them. We got 15,389 articles about manspreading. We got #Girlbosses. We got Ms Monopoly, a board game in which women make more than men. And now corporate feminism has leaned into the hospitality industry and bequeathed us the empowerment hotel.
Last week, easily missed among the innumerable other horrors coming out of Washington DC, saw the opening of Hotel Zena. Located near the White House, the venue describes itself as “a groundbreaking hotel dedicated to female empowerment”. The whole thing feels like it was conjured up by Ivanka Trump in a fever dream – although the patron saint of fluffy feminism, I should clarify, has nothing to do with this particular endeavour. Hotel highlights include pink pool tables, a $16 cocktail called the Empowermint and 60 pieces of art, that, as the press release boasts, were created by “feminists of both genders”. The pièce de résistance is a mural of late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made of 20,000 hand-painted organic tampons.
The fempowerment theme, alas, doesn’t stretch to (wo)management: the head chef of the hotel’s bar and restaurant, Figleaf, is a man. Considering female leaders are hugely unrepresented in the restaurant world, you would have thought it would be a no-brainer to hire a female chef. But, hey, when you’ve got 20,000 tampons to hand-paint, you can understand that certain other things might get overlooked. Still, it would have been nice if the marketing copy focused less on the minutiae of the art and more on details such as whether the staff are paid a living wage. When your brand is built on empowerment, it is also a bit weird to charge a sneaky $25 “guest amenities fee” per night that isn’t included in the initial room rate – particularly as a number of big hotel chains are currently being sued for this sort of “deceptive” pricing.
I don’t want to sound too negative about Zena: there is a special place in hell for women who are rude about other women’s menstrual murals. Indeed, I think it is a hugely inspiring concept and am now brimming with my own feminist hotel art ideas. Fireplaces where you can burn your bra, for example. An elevat-her and escalat-her to take you to the top. An interesting selection of intersecting sectionals to show you are an intersectional feminist. Rugs made out of armpit hair, perhaps. I have many more brilliant ideas where those came from, but as an empowered woman who knows my worth, I won’t give them all away at once.
The Guardian for more