Femininity and feminism

I'm a big admirer of Laura Kipnis (and she even looks kinda hot in her picture), and she doesn't let me down with her new article in Slate, about why feminists don't want to look, eh, unattractive.  She points out that there's a contradiction between feminism and femininity in that:

Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men.  It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself.

while...

Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth.

So I have two things to say about this:

One: It seems to me that much about sexual attraction can be explained through evolutionary psychology, which is to say: we're hardwired that way and can't really help our impulses.  On the other hand, if civilization is about overcoming our natural impulses in favor of something more elevated than our primal ancestors, then feminism is surely a civilizing force.  I am a bit resentful of the tendency among some feminists to view the masculine primal as "bad" and everything feminine primal as "good," and I'll cop to being amused by (largely male) comedians who point it out.  But there's no question that equality between the sexes is an ideal worth striving for and discussing at length.

Two:  Laura's premise that femininity=helplessness is certainly easy to observe in the world we live in, but it doesn't necessarily follow that this helplessness is inherently attractive to men.  Clearly, for some and perhaps most  men it is; but there is at least a significant minority who want their women strong and competent. 

None of this explains why some feminists still feel the need to live up to ideals of beauty that they say are offensive to them.  To say that they do it only for themselves ducks the issue: I don't think my wife dresses nicely to be attractive to other men as much as she simply wants to look good; and looking good involves approximating some ideal she's developed over a long time.  Perhaps these feminists need to be deprogrammed; but for now, they are struggling to rationalize the diets, make-up, and sense of fashion.

I attend yoga with women of all shapes, sizes, and age, and I'm struck by the fact that so many of them look great, even as they're so diverse.  Hot yoga is hardly conducive to checking out chicks, since everyone has to work hard and gets sweaty as well, but I've become a believer in the notion that all women (and probably all men) should focus on staying healthy, and the rest will follow.  Laura has written about obesity before; I am alarmed by the number of fat people, but less for reasons of aesthetics than for public health and economics. 

Comments

[littlem]

Eloquent and well-reasoned. If your wife works, there may be a possibility (in addition to her own personal aesthetic) that she has discovered that one's success in the current businessworld, to a fairly significant extent, also depends on some degree of cleavage (pun intended?) to cultural beauty norms; e.g., practicing female attorneys strongly admonished by their superiors to wear skirted suits to court when appearing before more conservative (particularly male) judges - that is, if they want to win their cases and not end up cited for contempt. (Yes, it happens.)

I have often thought that the feminist movement would do well to articulate that concern as opposed to lapsing into the "I just do" response to the question "why would you want to look good" - leaving themselves incomprehensibly open to that most demeaning of epithets as "irrational emotional women." Bleah.

Again, a most well-reasoned and empathetic commentary. Please have yourself and your friends that are sympathetic to this line of argument cloned.