Does This Make Me Look Fat?

Ann Althouse properly jumps up and down on a screed by Laura Kipnis bewailing the Evil Sith Power that is the Male Heterosexual Hegemony known as the Beauty Culture and the apparent inability of the Feminist Jedi to combat it. A sampling:

The reason they're incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing, because whatever you do, there's always that straggly inch-long chin hair or pot belly or just the inexorable march of time. (Even the dewiest ingénue is a Norma Desmond waiting to happen.)

Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth. Or that was the plan. Yet for all feminism's social achievements, what it never managed to accomplish was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture, meaning the time-consuming and expensive potions and procedures—the pedicures, highlights, wax jobs on sensitive areas, "aesthetic surgery," and so on. For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory. (And even those clearly destined to fail.)

Fer cryin' out loud. I thought people weren't allowed to write this sort of thing once they'd passed their freshman psych survey courses.

While I heartily agree that the rise in "aesthetic surgery" (you too can look like a porn star!) is an appalling trend, I really don't think that ordinary efforts to look one's best represent a shakling in Revlon-tinted chains. I also believe that anyone who thinks feminity is defined in the Culture today by helplessness and inadequacy has not been paying all that close attention.

I'm a small-f feminist. Most importantly, this means that I believe girls (i.e., the Llama-ettes) should be taught self-respect and self-reliance. In my experience, it's amazing how many of those snakes-in-the-head problems identified by Ms. Kipnis go away when these goals are emphasized instead of the much-vaunted self-esteem. (As an aside, my mother, another small-f feminist, often notes that the first woman doctor in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell, received her degree in 1849. Since then, Mom says, any woman who truly wants to be a doctor has had no excuse not to.) However, I do not believe that they should be taught that they somehow are not girls.

The trouble with capital-F Feminism (aside from its tarsome politization of everything under the sun) is that in its radical insistence on sweeping away the entire history of male/female sexual relationships with one fell thunderbolt, it seeks to do just that. And because it seeks to do the impossible, it quickly turns into a kind of frustrated self-loathing. Is it really any wonder that women would want to reject such a philosophy?

UPDATE: The Witty Sex Kitten weighs in with a defense of the Eve Ensler play that started all this rigamarole. As I say in response to her post, my main beef is not with Ensler, who I've not read, but with Kipnis' capital-F Feminism, which I believe, as I do with all such identity-based political movements, to be ultimately harmful to most of those who get caught up in it. With regard to the whole marriage competition thing that Ann Althouse expands on in her own follow up post, I am not even really that interested. My philosophy is that if my girls grow up with a proper sense of self-respect and self-reliance, then the results - whatever they might be - will take care of themselves.

UPDATE DEUX: Sheila gets it. But you knew she would.