You'ret wearing *that?!*

I've heard a number of smart, liberal people say something like this lately: "She is not in any shape to be wearing that bikini!" And, for reasons that are unclear to me, the smart, liberal people around them nod in agreement. Excuse me?

Statements like that, or variants of it like "she's too old to be wearing a skirt that short!" are really all expressions of one idea: people who look like X shouldn't wear Y. And in almost all popularly accepted formulations, what that statement boils down to is "people should look one way and people who don't look that way should hide it." This happens to people of all genders and is insidious because it is so prevalent and because it promotes a single ideal of what is beautiful. But I think it's particularly problematic for women because there's so much cultural focus on women's physical appearance and so much clothing industry focus on showing off or hiding women's bodies. And with women particularly (although increasingly also with men), what is beautiful and what is sexy are the same thing.

While it's true that saying women are only valuable because they're sexy is a problem, it's also true that saying "only women who look a certain way are sexy" is a problem. Because really, whose idea of sexy is that? I'll bet you a nickel it's one that reflects the patterns of many of the problematic isms of our society. And I'll bet you that it doesn't come from a group of empowered, liberated women, either. If our idea of what's sexy as a culture is a male idea, driven by the media and internalized by women and men alike, I think that makes it a feminist problem.

Fortunately, feminism is well equipped for this. It has rejected limiting ideas about women (they're not smart! they're not competent! they can't fight!) and limiting ideas about sex (it has to have a penis somewhere in it! don't have too much fun!). It's time to recognize the uniform ideals of beauty as being one more such limiting thing to be overcome.