Misogyny – Half-Blood Kuwaiti

I don’t like choice feminism.

If real feminism were a fruit, choice feminism would be artificial fruit candy, or maybe Fruit Loops cereal. Not nearly as good for you, but much easier to digest…and sell.

By choice feminism, I mean the idea that anything can be an act empowerment if it was freely chosen. Nothing is more important than choice. I’m not advocating taking choices away by any means, it’s just the only criteria for a good choice cannot be that it was a choice.

Maybe after centuries of women being told what to do all the time, the movement designed to help them doesn’t want to start doing it too. Maybe it’s due to feminism becoming mainstream, and too many people are chiming in who don’t want to think critically. But surely if we want to help women we have to be able to talk frankly about choices and consequences.

This is especially evident in the beauty industry, perhaps because of the amount of money at stake. If it makes you feel good, it’s good, even if it’s painful plastic surgeries that mutilate your body and threaten your health. But sometimes feeling good is just fitting into patriarchal beauty standards. It’s not bad to enjoy that; it’s understandably pleasant. But let’s not pretend all joy is your soul self-actualizing and reaching nirvana.

A short walk through any mall reveals ads using phrases like “express yourself,” “be you,” or “empowering” to describe shopping, often for entire categories of products that men don’t even buy. I guess they’ll never get to experience the satisfaction of being themselves or having rights. Or maybe I don’t need to buy pants made by a sweatshop worker in India to express who I am inside. Maybe makeup doesn’t somehow reveal my inner beauty by covering up my actual face.

There’s no way forward when people refuse to say anything is inherently harmful. Empowerment is not simply feeling good. It’s about gaining actual political, economic, social, or personal power. Feminism wanted to create a better world for women than the one where they only power they had was through being sexually attractive to men. It isn’t real power, and it doesn’t last. No one would patronize a man by saying he was empowered when he put on a nice suit or got a haircut. No one would expect them to be satisfied with something so inconsequential.

I recently followed an account on Instagram called @notyourmanicpixiedreamcurl. Helen doesn’t shave, wear makeup, or dye her hair and is critical of the idea that we should. While I don’t see myself giving up makeup anytime soon, I scroll through her content fascinated. One, it’s refreshing to see someone stating a real opinion, and two, she makes a lot of sense. Why is it that the natural female body is seen as disgusting? Why is it that women are told they’re expressing themselves through makeup when they’re actually changing themselves? How is painting on a new face everyday not a message to your psyche that your real one isn’t good enough?

I’m not sure I’m willing to sacrifice my own attractiveness at the altar of these principles, but the principles themselves are logical. In the end, the thing I most have an issue with is not women trying to be as attractive as possible. It may not be good for us, but it’s understandable, perhaps even instinctive. It was probably completely harmless in hunter-gatherer days because we didn’t have the option to surgically alter our entire bodies. My issue is with pretending this is an empowering, feminist choice just because it’s a choice.

When men care as much about their appearance as women do, it’s strangely unattractive. Many women would be horrified if their husbands started wearing makeup. Why? I’ve heard one theory that it reflects our hatred of women. Men who act like women are making themselves less because women are less. This is possible, but it seems odd to make wearing makeup such an integral part of being female when it hasn’t been for a long time. My theory is that it seems pathetic for a man to put so much weight on his physical appearance because he should know he’s worth so much more than that. But for women, it’s okay because it’s accepted that how they look is the most important thing about them. In a world where that kind of thinking is prevalent, imagine how damaging it is to believe your defining quality doesn’t even exist anymore after you wash your face at night.

If any men are reading this, I’m willing to bet many of them are nodding along agreeing, saying they’ve always said women shouldn’t wear makeup. Theoretically, I should like these men. In reality, I usually don’t. The more often they mention how much they don’t like makeup, the worse they usually are.

Many of them aren’t coming from a place of concern for how makeup affects women. They don’t believe it’s unnecessary because most women are so beautiful without it. The reason they don’t like makeup is because they think women shouldn’t pretend to be more attractive than they are.

It’s not totally illogical. But if no women wore makeup, we would get used to it and the standard would adjust to reflect that. The women you think are attractive with makeup would probably still look attractive. I once heard a man say he thought men were better-looking than women because they don’t need makeup. Newsflash: No one needs makeup. It’s something that exists, people use it, our expectations have adjusted accordingly. The man who hates makeup and expects women to be beautiful without it is so often toxic because our current beauty standards reflect the number of artificial means for enhancing beauty that are available. Without realizing it, makeup-hating men expect women to look that way without any help, which in my opinion is just cruel. The most beautiful women in the world wear makeup and get photoshopped. Most men can’t even tell when someone is wearing makeup. They genuinely don’t realize how unrealistic their expectations are, because very little of what they see around them is totally natural. I would prefer to be around more traditional misogynists who complain about women not putting in any effort to look good because at least they realize an effort is required.

In this strange reversal of common sense, men are giving themselves feminist points for criticizing and shaming women who are trying their best to get by in a world that values them most on things they can’t control. Whenever they try to take some level of control, they’re criticized for being artificial. But it’s hard to forgo the opportunity to be more attractive when going natural usually results in being asked by everyone if you’re sick. I’ve had people stare and even gasp when they see my natural face. I am apparently such a convincing portrait of illness that if I want to skip work, all I need to do is come in the next day bare-faced, and no one questions it. This strategy was once so successful my own students told me it was okay if I wanted to go home and take more time off.

I don’t think I’m an unattractive person, but incidents like these make me wonder. Sometimes I think we have forgotten what natural faces look like. In a world without makeup, my made-up face would be the shock, not the real one. But then I think I’m only telling myself this to feel better, that somehow I’m the only one who looks this way, who manages to masquerade as attractive with the right disguise but falls into hideousness without it. As much as I am defending the human frailty that leads us to paint our faces and even operate on them, beauty culture is still extremely damaging and this is one of the reasons why. Women have become more and more isolated in their insecurities. Just like men, even we don’t know what other women really look like anymore. We only see our own face, with all its flaws, and feel alone and ashamed. Although I wouldn’t put body hair removal in the same category as makeup, it often has a similar effect. Women grow up secretly ashamed of how much hair they have, believing they are a special, defective minority. But the truth is, when everyone removes their hair, no one knows what normal is anymore. When everyone wears makeup, filters their photos, and dyes their hair; when celebrities almost ubiquitously get nose jobs and Victoria’s Secret models get boob jobs, people forget what natural beauty looks like. They don’t even recognize it as beauty anymore when they see it.

In all of this, people seem to have forgotten that if the most important thing to you about a woman is her appearance, you have missed the point entirely. Looking prettier than you really are is only a crime when looking pretty is terribly important. It’s better to say women don’t need to wear makeup because they don’t need to look good. Men who are afraid of makeup think they’re entitled to a beautiful woman and deceiving them is like robbery. But what if we didn’t care what women did to their faces because their faces just weren’t that important anymore? We don’t live in this world yet—we probably never will—but if we did, it wouldn’t really matter if women wore makeup or not. It wouldn’t damage their self-esteem the same way, we wouldn’t think showing your unadorned face is showing your true self because it isn’t the self at all. Before we criticize something, it’s worth considering why we think the matter is so important in the first place. It all hinges on the idea that women are defined by their appearances, what they do or don’t do with them.

Sometimes, when I feel unattractive, I think about two things to feel comforted. One, it’s God’s fault I’m ugly not mine, so He should feel bad not me. Two, I remember that if the way I look is the most important thing about me, and the best thing, I have truly failed. I have succeeded in something that will surely fade, and failed at everything that really matters. I can’t control what the world values, if people are more impressed by my painted-on face than my personality, but at least I can decide how I value myself. How I feel at night in bed with my eyes closed is more important than anything I see in the mirror.

With the murder of Mahsa Amini and the subsequent Iranian protests taking the world by a storm, many people have spoken up not only against forced hijab but also against hijab bans, like those in France. Whenever an oppressive law is put in place that affects women, the explanation given is always that men want to control them. And in a way, that makes sense. It’s not hard to find men who want to control their wives, sisters, and even mothers. And while that’s not necessarily an incorrect interpretation of what’s happening, it’s also not the full picture.

I live in a conservative Arab country. I don’t think I have to mention the downsides to this, but an upside, if you could call it that, is a better understanding of misogyny. I like to think that the years of suffering have at least given me insight. And my conclusion is that the deeper problem in all of this, more than just control, is that in most cultures and ideologies women bear the burden of representing the beliefs of men more than the men themselves do.

Men in most places get to behave pretty much the same way. They wear the same clothes at the beach. No one tells them not travel, work, or seek an education. People tell them not to have sex but no one is really surprised when they do anyway, except their mothers. What defines the openness of a society is the role of women. The Victorian Era was so repressive that legend has it people covered the legs of their chairs to avoid provoking sexual thoughts. And yet, they had a terrible prostitution problem. What happened then is the same thing that happens in the Middle East now. Respectable women don’t have premarital sex, so respectable men just have it with someone else.

Women are the battleground of everyone’s conflicting beliefs. Muslim men believe in modesty, so they want their wives to cover up. The French hate Muslims, so they ban hijab. In both situations, women are the ones who end up struggling. It’s true that in many cases Muslim women are forced to cover by men (even though there are women who cover by choice), but bans on hijab don’t do anything to punish these men. They just further limit the freedom and access to education of the women who need it most. Even in the Arab world, there are beaches that ban hijabis, often because they don’t want conservative people making everyone in bikinis feel uncomfortable. But what’s the metric used for banning conservative men? How will they be marked in public?

This doesn’t just apply to the Middle East. Conservative Americans don’t want abortion, another issue that miraculously only applies to women. Whichever side of that debate you fall on, at the end of the day, women have to deal with either the consequences of getting pregnant or those of an abortion. Neither is easy, despite what some people like to pretend. People argue that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be legal tomorrow. But if the sins of men showed up on their own bodies instead of on women’s, the entire structure of our world would change.

The real measure of a man in the Arab world is not himself but his wife. A liberal man and a conservative man may appear exactly the same until you see the type of woman they’re willing to marry. And the more hypocritical the man is, the prouder he is of his culture and religion. If he were less proud, he wouldn’t bother clinging to values he consistently fails at. No one seems to realize they’re proud of something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. They are saved from being what they hate by women, whom they also hate.

I don’t mean to say there are no genuinely religious or conservative men. There definitely are. But they’ll never be the majority because it’s just too difficult for most people, male or female. Restrictive societies often end up encouraging people to do the opposite of what they preach. When nice girls aren’t supposed to have relationships with men, men end up being more promiscuous because they are forced to have casual sexual encounters if they want to have any at all. Women learn that the only way to survive is to lie. And few things threaten the sanctity of your marriage like barely knowing the person you’ve committed to spending your life with.

It’s only natural to fail in these circumstances. As Nathaniel Branden points out in The Six Pillars of Self Esteem, when the values you’re taught don’t allow you to be human, hypocrisy is the only way to survive. I don’t fault men for failing to live up to the ideals of our society. I fault them for expecting women to.

They want their women to do what they could not, as if that is their last chance. Maybe their ideals can still be realized then. On women, everything shows. Pregnancy, virginity, modesty. On men, almost nothing. So maybe, if she’s succeeded, somehow everyone else has too.

Maybe we should stop expecting women to represent anyone other than themselves. Or maybe we should look at the ways they really are a reflection of their men. It’s not their bodies. They don’t represent your purity. But their oppression represents your ignorance, their suffering your selfishness, their torture and murder your complete and utter failure as human beings.

Men do want to control women, but not usually for the sheer pleasure of it. They control women because it’s easier than controlling themselves. The behavior of women is not the problem. They are only a mirror held up to the rest of society, the hidden sins of everyone else made visible. If you don’t like what you see, change yourself.

Tag: Misogyny

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