Which is why sex working/burlesquing/wearing lipstick is somehow (mis)construed as *gaining* *power* because that’s where you get if you extrapolate far enough from female-worth = female-beauty. Even though nothing could really be less empowering than that central underlying fact that you are worth what men decide you are worth.
So it’s not like wearing lipstick in itself is disempowering - it’s neutral - but thinking or claiming it gains you power actual is.
And god, you know, if these days it is like the thing that we laugh at women who burnt their bras as a feministy thing I hope we are going to laugh ten times harder and longer at women who wear corsets and then say that is a feministy thing. I mean, god, wear a corset if you want, wear 12, but don’t start saying it’s empowering. Your underwear is not really doing anything to address the power differentials between men and women now is it? After you take your corset off the world is just that same. So you know, wear so many corsets you can’t get up off the floor if you want, but don’t tell me it’s political. It’s not.
And while we’re on the subject you can say burlesque to me as many times as you like I am still only going to hear stripping with class pretensions. Nothing wrong with it – but women taking their clothes off and being the looked-at-things is hardly new and revolutionary.
What is - or would be - new and revolutionary is this, very simply, men as sex objects for women.
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