Scantily-clad social media ‘feminism’ is anything but
For years now, I’ve felt awkward when people ask me whether I’m a feminist. I just don’t know what to say, because I don’t really understand what feminism, in its current usage, actually means. Or, rather, I think I have a sense of what it means, and it worries me. Feminism, as far as I can tell, has become a set of handy buzzwords that – among other things – enables women to live the most sexual is ed, appearancefocused life humanly possible and then present it as empowerment.
This sorry pass was abundantly clear last week in the furore over a picture posted to Instagram by Khloe Kardashian, 36, of the reality-TV clan of world renown. The unwanted picture posted to her 136 million followers on Instagram was – gasp! – “unfiltered”: the shot showed her in a scanty leopard-print bikini by a pool. If you look closely, you can see that she’s not caked in make-up. She doesn’t look like pure, surgically enhanced muscle, either; rather, as if she has something vaguely in common with a normal 36-year-old mother.
The horror! Every effort was immediately taken to get the image removed from the internet which, of course, is impossible because it was immediately, endlessly reproduced.
Kardashian’s explanation for her extreme reaction to this slip of the mask, and her desire to keep images like that a million miles away from Instagram, was typically convoluted. It meshed victimhood with the lingo of empowerment and self-love.
“It’s almost unbearable trying to live up to the impossible standards that the public have all set for me,” she said, before claiming: “My body, my image and how I choose to look and what I want to share is my choice. It’s not for anyone to decide or judge what is acceptable or not anymore.” Was she defending her right to look natural, or her sense of outrage that the world had seen her thus? It seemed a confused mix of both.
Either way, like many female influencers using their bodies to sell beauty and other items, or just to get famous, Kardashian clearly feels at home with the language of choice and self-determination.
But this new breed of digital sirens are playing a risky game. They claim to be feminists. Call me fusty and old-fashioned, but it’s hard for me to see how objectifying yourself to the absolute utmost, in the most brazen way, is feminist. Being so dependent on this perfected image that a single naturalistic picture threatens everything is not a mark of empowerment, but of enslavement. They are deluded, and what is worse, they are deluding the millions of young women gawping at their pictures every day, wishing they too could be like them.
But calling a spade a spade is increasingly difficult. Take two of the world’s most famous girls: Addison Rae and Sissy Sheridan, with 76 million and five million followers respectively on video app TikTok. Both got their large followings by posting videos of themselves slowly and seductively strutting or dancing in bikinis or croptops and tiny shorts. Addison Rae, lauded as a go-getting entrepreneur, and “more than just a pouty face” by the Wall Street Journal, had this to say on becoming a beauty mogul: “I feel like for every girl, it’s a dream.” Sheridan, meanwhile, was recently hailed in a magazine article as a “feminist” who resists “slut-shaming”.
I watched a few of her videos. They were pure sex. This doesn’t mean she, or any girl or woman, should be slut-shamed. But it reinforces a sad, narrowing reality. As social media suggests, mainstream female worth, aspiration and identity has never been so starkly about bodies, sexy dancing and big, glossy lips. This is a regression, not an improvement. That it goes under the heading of “feminism” is as depressing as it is counterintuitive.
If feminism in the original sense was about freedom, it was also, in large part, about freedom from the shackles of beauty that for millennia had kept women down. In Naomi Wolf ’s iconic The Beauty Myth (1990), she argued that a cultural conspiracy shackled women, from top to toe, inside and out, by tethering their worth to their beauty, and ensuring that women felt worthless unless they felt beautiful. But beauty can never quite be attained. Cue the rise and rise of the beauty industry, from cosmetics to cosmetic procedures.
Since Wolf wrote the book, the beauty myth has only gained a wider, firmer grasp, clouding the original purpose of feminism. The legions of beauty-chasers on social media claim also to be chasing empowerment and freedom. But feminism used to reach far beyond appearance. In the 1910s, it was a campaign for the right to vote, among other entitlements we now consider basic.
In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement also had an agenda that, while complex and not without inner contradictions, had a set of clear, urgent goals.
Today, I’m not exactly sure what feminism is pursuing, if anything. It seems to have come unshackled from concrete battles and settled itself somewhere vaguely between sex and sexiness.
Sure, women have the right to be sexy. But feminism used to be, and should be, about so much more.