RT @(redacted): Most girls that I know or have met look prettier without makeup. Just sayin’, ladies…
I understand that tweet was well intentioned, but it may as well have read:
HEY LADIES MY SENSE OF AESTHETICS HAS RESULTED IN A NEW DICTUM FOR YOUR APPEARANCE
Hey guys, how about we stop assuming that women’s looks are our business? Let’s acknowledge women’s liberty to act according to their personal tastes, eh?
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No! These things are never as simple as they seem. Sure, women should have a right to make choices about their appearances for themselves. But a conscious choice to adhere to a norm often ends up promoting it, which then oppresses people who want to make the choice *not* to conform. See, with “choices” like wearing makeup, or wearing high heels, or wearing a burqa, it’s not the case that any woman who wants to can simply go either way. Many, many women are in situations where the choice is essentially forced. If you’re a woman who consciously chooses to go along with the norm in those situations, then you are adding, albeit incrementally, to the pressure on women who *don’t* want to conform. Yes, you should have a right to make that decision for yourself. However, you can’t always make that decision for yourself without negatively impacting others’ rights to choose for *them*selves. That’s why this sort of issue is always very dicey and needs to be treated on a case-by-case basis and with extreme care. The line of argumentation that I’m supporting here may seem comically overblown when applied to a middle-class woman in a progressive workplace and her decision to wear makeup, but there are many cases where it is deadly, deadly serious, and they’re all instances of the same social phenomenon on different scales. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s a growing literature on how to split the difference between liberalism (“Everyone should be able to make their own choices!”) and social constructionism (“‘Free’ choice is an lie that fucks over everyone else!”). Unfortunately, so far they’ve turned out to be extremely difficult perspectives to integrate, but a starting point that at least gives a good treatment of the difficulties involved is /Sex, Culture and Justice/ by Clare Chambers.
… That said, the guy who tweeted that line almost certainly didn’t have any of these things in mind and was, actually, just being a bit of a skeez. :p