Feminism has never looked better – literally.
Whether it’s gangs of female friends, full-faces on, donning pink body con and posing for group selfies before watching the Barbie movie, or TikTok videos where pretty young influencers explain concepts like internalised misogyny while applying lip-gloss, the notion that feminists are haggard, hairy, bra-burning and…well…ugly, is surely a thing of the past.
Fourth-wave feminism is mainstream, magenta pink, and all about choice. Of course, you can be a feminist and still get Botox, as well as a breast lift, your eyebrows micro-bladed, and your bikini line waxed, create heatless curls each night, and follow a seven-step skin routine, and wear red lipstick and heels, and…hang on…this all sounds quite tiring. Is that the point?
While researching my latest novel about beauty standards, I re-read The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, who wrote, “The more rights women achieve, the stricter the rules of beauty get.”
She argued that increased beauty standards are used as a political solution against female advancement. Beauty ideology exists to make us feel ‘worth less’ to counterbalance feminist advances telling us we’re worth more. As we inevitably succumb to the pressure to look a certain way, women in their ‘raw’ or ‘natural’ state shift from the category ‘woman’ to the category ‘ugly’. The pressure is so intense that adhering to these standards becomes almost obligatory. Wolf wrote, “Choice means nothing if the choice is to survive or to perish.”
Of course, the book wasn’t received without criticism. For one, it largely ignored the issue of race, whiteness, and other intersectionality in our beauty ideals. Also, Wolf has become a controversial figure of late and was banned from Twitter in 2021. But, despite the book being published in 1990, does this core message stand? If she was right, then this latest wave of feminism will raise the bar of how women are supposed to look.
I came of age in the feminist wastelands of the early noughties, and it wasn’t exactly easy to keep up with beauty standards back then. Circles of shame hovered around a celebrity’s cellulite, Bridget Jones was considered ‘fat’, and every girl in college was on the Special K diet as we chased lollypop heads and Size Zero. However, beauty did seem simpler back then. You cleansed, toned, and moisturised. Done. For a night out, you shoved on jeans and a nice top and dabbed on some eyeliner. Done. And, for a really special event, like a Leaver’s Ball, you’d curl your hair.
Now, it’s almost impossible to keep up – both financially and logistically – with the long list of products, procedures, and technology marketed to us as normal grooming requirements.
Social media has put us under a 24-hour gaze, where we’re expected to look as good in a selfie taken during a hungover Gilmore Girls marathon as we are out having cocktails. And while, of course, there have been major steps forward, like the body positivity movement and increased racial visibility in fashion spreads, the overwhelming default is still thin, young, white, and an increasingly impossible idea of perfect – leaving us feeling drained and demoralised.