Why Your Women's Day Spa Discount is a Political Betrayal

Each year on March 8, social media swells with pink graphics, flowery wishes and advertisements for sales on beauty products and spa treatments. Cafes offer ‘Women’s Day Specials’. Workplaces cut cakes, husbands buy flowers.

While gestures of appreciation are harmless and kind, they represent a troubling dilution of a revolutionary legacy. International Women’s Day (IWD) was never meant to be a soft celebration of domestic femineity or consumer indulgence. Its very roots lie in resistance, in strikes and in the demand for justice. To trivialise it with discounts and offers is to betray the women who marched, were imprisoned and even died to claim the rights we too easily take for granted.

Women’s Day must return to its origins as a serious political and moral occasion. It must be the day that insists on sustained engagement with gendered inequality, structural violence, economic injustice and the plight of women in the zones of crisis. March 8 is not about tokens of affection – it is about solidarity, reflection and participation in a still unfinished revolution.

The origins of IWD trace back to the class struggles of the early 20th century. It was first proposed by German Marxist Clara Zetkin in 1910 at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen. Inspired by the women workers demanding suffrage and better labour conditions, Zetkin envisioned a day that would unite women across nations in the struggle for equality and justice.

The first official IWD was celebrated in 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. Over a million women marched demanding political rights, shorter working hours and an end to the discrimination in employment.

In 1917, Russian women textile workers staged a mass demonstration on March 8 demanding “bread and peace”, an act that defined the Russian Revolution. It was their refusal to remain silent that toppled a centuries-old monarchy. Lenin would later recognise March 8 as an official holiday, not for celebration but for commemorating political courage.

This origin matters because it exposes how far today’s observances have drifted. What began as a clarion call to collective action has become a corporate celebration wrapped in pink ribbons. The commercialisation of IWD detaches it from a social movement and attaches it to individual self-care routines.

Philosopher Nancy Fraser has rightly pointed out this “cultural turn” when feminism became a brand rather than a political movement. A movement that once aimed to transform society has been harnessed to work within neoliberal capitalism.

Walk through any shopping mall in early March and you will find IWD turned into a sales pitch. This reinforces the same tired stereotype that a woman’s worth lies in her appearance or in being pampered for a day. These gestures are neither empowering nor revolutionary. They commodify femineity and ignore social, political and economic conditions that still suppress women globally.

bell hooks precisely warned against this in her book Feminism is For Everybody. She argued that feminism was never about making women ‘equal to men’ in a flawed system. It was about reconstructing that system entirely. But consumerism tempts us to forget the feminist struggle as bell hooks saw it, as a shared, radical act of political engagement. When corporate companies use Women’s Day to sell products, they transform a day of resistance to an occasion of profit. This results in sheer distraction.

This superficial ‘celebration’ of women also reinforces the very hierarchies the feminist movement sought to dismantle. Consider how often advertisements use idealised images of urban middle class women smiling over a coffee, while the women who clean those cafes or work in the coffee factory remain faceless.

The global garment industry dominated by female labour in developing countries is still subjected to exploitation. The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh on April 24, 2013, killing over 1,100 garment workers (mostly women) remains a reminder that the feminist struggle cannot coexist comfortably with blind consumerism.

Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that “the most mediocre of males feels himself as a demigod as compared with women”. Decades later, her observation still resonates. The danger Beauvoir warned about, forgetting the long history of subordination once comforts set in, remains urgent today. “Never forget” she insisted, “that it only takes one political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be called into question. To forget is to lose ground and to trivialise March 8 is to aid that loss.

That forgetting manifests most painfully in how IWD celebrations often erase the struggles of women elsewhere: Afghan girls denied schooling since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Iranian women risking execution for removing their hijabs during the Women, Life, Freedom movement sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, Sudanese women facing sexual violence in conflict zones, Palestinian and Ukrainian mothers fleeing bombardments and countless others whose stories are not told with pink confetti but with blood and displacement.

To celebrate IWD with cosmetics and wellness discounts while some women suffer somewhere is a moral dissonance that demands reckoning.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” becomes instructive here. Arendt described how moral atrocities occur not only through overt cruelty but through thoughtlessness, the unreflective acceptance of normalised wrongs. To unthinkably participate in IWD festivities without acknowledging the world’s ongoing misogyny is precisely an act of banal complacency.

True liberation demands moral courage and structural reforms. Feminism is a continual act of breaking the limits imposed by patriarchy. But this continual act is collective hooks argued that feminism must be intersectional and not a club for privilege.

Modern societies often pride themselves on gender progress while ignoring how unevenly it is distributed. The gender pay gap persists globally, with women earning on average 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In political representation, women held only 27.1% of parliamentary seats worldwide. The WHO reports that ongoing gender-based violence affects nearly one in three women globally. These are issues that don't require a day of celebration but sustained policy interventions and ethical dialogue.

The media plays a decisive role in shaping cultural memory of Women’s Day. In today’s world of hyper-commercialised messaging, attention has become the most lucrative commodity. A 2024 Reuters Institute analysis of digital news and social media trends suggests a broader shift away from sustained political and activist engagement online. This is even as lifestyle-driven, branded content around causes such as IWD has become increasingly prominent. This imbalance reflects exhaustion, and this illusion is dangerous.

In regions of conflict, women carry the burdens of both war and reconstruction. The underrated stories of women journalists in Ukraine, of doctors in Gaza, of activists in Myanmar highlight that silence kills advocacy. Without media coverage, their courage remains local, their suffering unseen. IWD must therefore be reclaimed as a revolt against forgetfulness, not as a festival of forgetfulness.

Rehumanising IWD requires symbolic and practical shifts in how societies engage with it. First institutions must treat March 8 as an occasion for critical dialogue. Solidarity across borders must be renewed. It is not enough for women in secure societies to celebrate their freedom while others lose theirs. Global feminism must resist the fragmentation that neoliberalism fosters.

The women in Berlin who attends a panel discussion, the woman in Nairobi fighting against female genital mutilation, the girl in Kabul hidden away from school, the young woman in Tehran cutting off her hair in silent protest, the midwife in Rafah delivering babies in makeshifts tents, the Dalit girl in India sued for drinking from the village well: all belong to the same ongoing narrative of struggle.

Every human being deserves the capabilities necessary for a dignified life. Solidarity begins by acknowledging that capability inequality is still the defining issue of our age. 

IWD reclaimed should function as a civic ritual reminding societies of their shared responsibility in eradicating injustice. When a company replaces that weight with discount coupons, it desecrates that memory. When citizens reduce the day to flowers and cake, they participate in a collective act of memory erasure.

Political responsibility lies in how one participates within systems that produce unjust outcomes. Thus, celebration of Women’s Day can never be an apolitical or neutral act. It can either reinforce injustice or resist it.

The most profound way to celebrate Women’s Day is through commitment: to the Afghan girl who dreams of classrooms unseen. To the Sudanese refugee who rebuilds her life from scraps, the single mother facing workplace bias, the trans woman denied recognition. They are citizens of a world that remains unfinished in its justice.

IWD should provoke discomfort, introspection and action. It should remind us that feminism was born out of factories, protests and prisons, not from parlours, cafes or boutiques. Its founders demanded bread, peace, access and equality. To honour them is to ensure that the women of Gaza, of Kabul, of Iran, of Sudan are not forgotten behind the glitter of social media campaigns.

As an apocryphal quote of Beauvoir's goes, “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now without delay.” Women’s Day is the world’s annual test of whether we are willing to act or whether we prefer comfort over discomfort. The question remains, when we light our candles, or cut our cakes on IWD, are we celebrating freedom or masking its absence?

Tonmoyee Rani Neog is a researcher and writer based in Wolfsburg, Germany.

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