02 — I’m sorry feminism.
I have spent (likely) thousands of dollars trying to be prettier when I could have donated that money to a women’s center.
As with many young girls who developed before their peers, I often got dress-coded in class. This act seemed like an affront to my god-given right to wear two tank tops layered over one another just like everyone else. Once, my friends and I protested the dress-coding of a dear friend who had the audacity to wear shorts in the summer. Look, girls, the teacher pleaded, I get it, but I am protecting her from the lecherous eyes and colour commentary of teenage boys. You have to understand. We did not understand why teenage girls were always being punished, it seemed, for the lechery of their peers.
In a fit of Petra Collins-coded rage, I sharpied “girls just wanna have fundamental human rights” onto a white t-shirt, which was somewhat riot grrrl considering I grew up in suburban Ontario and if you’re using an incredibly generous definition of the term. I was considered particularly obnoxious but ultimately harmless to have in class. I thought I was a feminist warrior.
Anyway.
This month, I have been obsessing over how my new haircut makes my face look fat. Feminist warrior, my ass!
I was born fourteen days after Malala Yousufzai, which made flunking math tests especially gut-wrenching. She was out there winning Nobel Peace Prizes while I was over here in the aforementioned suburban Ontario, sitting in third period wondering if the semi-viral tweet that boy posted about how girls who cover up their acne with foundation look like vanilla Crunch bars was about me specifically or just generally. I’m sorry, Malala Yousufzai — although technically, you did get a fourteen-day head start.
There’s a scene in the television series Fleabag where the lead confesses that she isn’t sure if she’d have been as much of a feminist if she had bigger tits. As someone of big tit experience, I’m not sure if I’d have been as much of a feminist if I had nicer skin as a teenager. There’s always something else.
I constantly look at the faces of beautiful women on the internet. Pinterest is especially good for this because you can filter by skin tone range, so you can see exactly what you would look like if you had an entirely different bone structure and also were perfect and could pull off blue eyeshadow. I have never ranked anyone’s face on a scale of 1-10 — aside from my own, which I generally rate between a 3-8, depending on how I’m feeling that day.
I never rank myself a ten, as I am cognizant of the fact there are women in the world who look like Emily Ratajkowski. Then, I feel guilty for using Emily Ratajkowski to lower my self-esteem, because I read My Body and she’s been through enough. I’m sorry, Emily Ratajkowski. You are a whole person who does not deserve to be used solely for face-ranking purposes.
I often make lists of things I can do to improve myself. Yes, they include respectable tasks like reading more books and adhering more strictly to a budget but mostly they are dominated with aesthetic concerns and potential new diet routines to try.
In the vein of Rayne Fisher-Quann's standing on the shoulders of complex female characters I am greatly concerned about how these lists will be received if they are ever discovered upon my untimely demise. Surely they will not be regarded with the same respect as Joan Didion’s fastidious packing list.
Sometimes I can’t write anything because I continually compare myself to Joan Didion, who was a serious writer whereas I am relatively unserious. I’m sorry, Joan Didion. I shouldn’t have minimized your craft by at one point making my social media handle a rude pun about your name.
Today, I think of Eve Babitz’s vitriolic letter to Joan Didion, in which she questions if the author would have been as commercially successful if she weighed more. Certainly less people would have her set as their Twitter profile picture.
I used to weigh 124 lbs. I currently weigh 153 lbs, which is fine because I’m a whole person either way. Still, when a friend introduces me to his new girlfriend at a bar, I freeze — the only thing I can think to say is you’re so skinny! You’re doing womanhood so much better than I am! Or course, I do not say that because that would be a decidedly anti-feminist compliment.
Women are supposed to be effortlessly thin or appropriately body positive and focused on more intellectual pursuits either way. I’m sorry, friend’s girlfriend at bar. I’m sure you have a rich inner life.
The point is that as much as I call myself a feminist, I have consistently betrayed feminism by obsessing over aesthetics and the worst part is that I still look like myself, just with slightly shinier lips because I felt bad about myself and spent $24 on a coconut lip balm from glossier.
The Lip Injections Saga
I ask if lip injections are feminist on my Instagram story, and two people reply, because I am not particularly popular on Instagram.
“definitely not feminist but just makes me feel better in the capitalist patriarchal world we live in, same w waxing my legs and wearing makeup like i should just be allowed to exist naturally but doing all of these things helps me feel more worthy unfortunately.”
“Thought about it but then decided they looked bad actually. I say do u tho”
I decide that I will, in fact, do me.
When I go to the free consultation, she is nice to me, which somehow surprises me. I’m not quite sure why I am surprised that a person selling me an expensive cosmetic procedure is providing excellent service, but I suppose I expected more of a mean ballet teacher / modelling coach / sorority hazer who tells you to eat cotton balls and circles your insecurities with sharpie kind of vibe.
Instead, she talks to me like a friend, or at least a friendly girl in the bathroom of a bar. She gives me a small handheld mirror. I soften, hold the mirror up to examine my lips as I have done many times before, although this time with an audience. You have really nice lips, she says, with that arch here, and for some reason this makes me cringe, the thought that they are nice already and I’m doing all this for naught, but they are a little uneven here.
I look. I don’t see it, to be honest I came in just thinking they were small in proportion with the rest of my face. I was unaware they were uneven, too. I look a little harder. I guess I can see it. We can fix that for sure, she promises. Thank god.
She patiently answers my litany of questions, yes, you can kind of feel it when kissing, then asks me when I’d like to book the appointment. I stammer excuses. I’m going on vacation, and also to a wedding. I’ll have to wait and see.
A week later, I am making peach jam and listening to Amyl and the Sniffers in my kitchen with a friend. We start talking about the petty aesthetic enforcements of the patriarchy. But if I only end up wearing baggy clothes as a reaction to men’s reactions when I wear tight ones, isn’t that also reactionary? We laugh. When do we just get to just exist? We grow quiet. I tell her that once I even went to a consultation for lip injections, and she looks quizzically back. Isn’t that so crazy? But yeah, I decided not to go, of course. I’m not going to go.
I keep thinking about it, though. I talk about it frequently amongst friends, one of whom I mention it to so frequently that she eventually says that she knows of a place where we can go together for a besties discount. I am not sure, I say, trying to maintain my feminist higher ground. She jokes that we can justify the expense as gender-affirming care.
In Andrea Long Chu’s Females, she makes the bold assertion that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” She asserts that femaleness is not biological but existential, the performance of female gender existing as, “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” Under her definition, the injection of a foreign substance into my lips would certainly qualify as affirmational. I’m sorry, Andrea Long Chu. I am worried about quoting Females because I’m not entirely sure I understood it correctly or if I am mischaracterizing the text.
One of the first feminist texts I read was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. The early-2000s book critiques the limitations of the sexual revolution, which now seem less liberating and more like enforced conformity along somewhat new norms. I definitely still want to be sexually liberated and not some trad-wife variant, please do not let me be misunderstood. But I believe Ariel Levy made some good points about the joke being on us if we delude ourselves into thinking doing exactly what men want at great expense to ourselves is personally empowering because we’re like, totally doing it for a completely different personal reason, not a patriarchal one, even if the end result is exactly the same.
What I’m getting at is I’m tired of not shaving my armpits in order to subvert the male gaze only for the only messages I get on dating apps to be weird come-ons from men with a thing for armpit hair anyway.
My sister and I were eating dinner together when I told her I made an appointment to get lip injections. I’m such a bad feminist, I say, fishing for validation. She hesitates. Isn’t it a feminist act, she wonders, since you are an empowered woman doing so out of your own volition?
I quickly disparage choice feminism, which, in my opinion, would find arms dealing feminist if a woman was the one hawking the missiles upon the black market (and ultimately, often does, e.g. brat Kamala summer, or whatever). I believe in the existence of interconnected systems of oppression and influence that make it impossible for decisions to exist in a vacuum, I explain to my sister.
It’s hardly feminist to play into existing patriarchal power structures that enforce a normative set of aesthetic standards onto women, you know. Especially if you’re maligned and marginalized for not adhering to said standards.
Okay, sure. So why are you getting them done again?
Because I’m insecure about my lips, I pout.
I end up not getting lip injections, not because of any grand feminist statement, but because my cat almost dies and I have to cancel the appointment. For all the time I spent thinking about them, I could have read Judith Butler. I’m sorry, Judith Butler. I’ll get around to it one day — right now I have to figure out what to do about my haircut.
When I started writing this essay my aim was to be kind of silly and crack jokes about the whole thing but now it’s making me sad. I sold out the feminist revolution and all I got was this push-up bra wire digging into my ribcage.
I’m sorry, teenage Sabrina. You were always more fearless than me.
As a thank you for reading, here is a complimentary photo of myself as a young teen. Yes, that was my actual hair. You can find more embarrassing photos of me on my Instagram @1954film.