A woman wonders, very tentatively, if there’s anything at all sexist about the ever-escalating trend (aka pressure) for women to spend much of their time and money repairing putative flaws in their faces breasts genitals buttocks legs arms hands feet nails teeth hair.

It’s nothing shocking now for women of my age (30) and younger to seek out anti-ageing procedures. To feel troubled by this puts you in strange territory.

I feel sometimes there is a feedback loop in feminism. Issues first raised by second-wave feminism – and perhaps broached too prescriptively – were later reconsidered under the idea that feminism should allow women to do what they want. Take body hair removal. Quite rightly, feminists over the years have highlighted shaving and waxing as an area of inequality, a thing women generally have to bother with if they don’t wish to face ridicule or worse. Later this idea was readdressed, with some third-wave feminists arguing that if shaving feels good to an individual woman, then it shouldn’t be seen as oppressive – it could, for her, be an act of empowerment.

In other words to throw out feminism altogether. “Third wave” feminism isn’t feminism at all, it’s just the same old shit with the label “choice” added. Shaving doesn’t “feel good” to an individual woman out of nowhere, it “feels good” because she’s aware of the social expectations and the punishments for not meeting them. Doing what those expectations dictate is not “empowerment.” Hairless legs and crotches do not equal power.

I have no moral high ground here: the only reason I don’t commit to all those ways of rendering yourself standardly attractive to society is that I’m too lazy or too cheap, not because I’m above doing it. I have no admonishment whatsoever for individual women who get to feel a bit happier about their appearances, and I don’t believe it is morally wrong to get cosmetic procedures. At the same time, I think we are foolish to accept the mainstreaming of cosmetic intervention without querying what it will do to us. 

That “at the same time” is doing a lot of work.

Forget it. Forget trying to appease the choosy-choice pseudo-feminists. You can’t do it anyway, so don’t bother to try.

I also feel this way about the uncritical discussion of rough sex and BDSM practices.

You mean men strangling women? That “rough sex”? The kind that too often ends up with a dead woman and a live man who says oops and goes on his way rejoicing?

I’ve seen young women whose politics I share disavow contemporary feminism altogether, because all they see in the movement are self-interested white women who exclude trans people, sex workers or other demographics that don’t include them. 

That’s not what you’re seeing though. Feminist women don’t “exclude trans people”; we refuse to “include” men in the category “women,” because that category is for women (and so not men). Feminism is for and about women, not men who say they are women. And feminism doesn’t exclude women exploited by the sex trade, it excludes pimps. And this feminism – the real feminism – is not exclusively white, either.