On Barbie's Cellulite
Or, "Everyone else's compromises are morally bankrupt."
Damn, this piece drove me insane. Doubly so because there are some great lines in it.
To be a functioning member of society at all is to participate, and to participate is to be complicit. The easy line is “capitalism makes hypocrites of us all,” but it’s more generalizable than that: society makes hypocrites of us all, because participating involves modulating oneself to some extent.
Conformity, to a greater or lesser degree.
And yet, when you hear arguments like the one in this piece, it’s almost always directed at women who are reaching for new heights (Greta, etc) or at “women’s media” (Barbie, etc). That thing women like and are engaging with? Here’s why it’s Bad For Women, semicolon, and Why You’re Bad Too For Liking It. That woman doing things a million men have done before, but unlike them also acknowledging and apologizing for her own shortcomings and attempting in some meager fashion to mitigate them and nudge the aircraft carrier of society a few degrees in the right direction? Crooked. Hypocrite. Bad Feminist.
What is that if not internalized misogyny?
We all got to enjoy Top Gun: Maverick in peace, didn’t we?
We are so very comfortable with the contradictions of modern life when they are not so explicitly gendered — we all have iPhones, yes? iPhones that are almost certainly made possible by forced labor and that are quite certainly made possible by mining processes that have devastating ecological consequences, yes? Yet we nevertheless continue primping our revolutionary aesthetic on Substack and Twitter, yes?
But to shave your legs is to Betray All Women.
Back in the day Jezebel was home to some fantastic writers, but it also made a business out of this brand of holier-than-thou, leftist-on-leftist, feminist-on-feminist takedown, before eventually, ironically, inevitably finding themselves on the receiving end. Somehow the writers of these pieces are always pure, and their chosen medium or vehicle beyond reproach. They, and they alone, are outside the snow globe, which is a very convenient place to cast stones from — at least for a time, until they find themselves getting a little too big for their britches or reaching just a little too far. See how quickly the ground then shifts beneath their feet. There is no escaping the snow globe.
Hillary was AOC before AOC was AOC. See how quickly AOC now becomes Hillary.
Greta Gerwig is just wearing makeup to work and also trying to get tampons in the bathroom. She’s just doing it at a larger scale than we are, which makes her an easy target.
And she’s a woman, which, of course, as always, makes her a deserving one.