It’s Okay To Want To Look Hot. You’re Not a Bad Feminist.

Jane Fonda recently admitted, as regretfully as if coming clean about defrauding an animal shelter, that even though she’s a feminist, she still wants men to be attracted to her.

“If I’m going to be on a Zoom meeting and I know that there’s going to be a man—even if I go to a doctor and it’s a guy—I mean, I feel ashamed even admitting this, but I pay a little extra attention to how I look than I do if it’s a woman,” she said in an interview with Grazia. “I became an adult in the ’50s and it’s just part of my DNA,” she offered, as a defense.

“You can look beautiful and still be a feminist,” Fonda clarified. It’s trying to look beautiful for a man that’s problematic.

I love Jane Fonda, just like I love the many friends, glossy magazines, and feminist thinkers I’ve heard express the same idea over the years: It’s okay to want to look good. It’s just not okay to want to look good for men. I want to take their beautiful faces in my hands and say: What the hell are you talking about? 

Sexual beings want to attract each other. This is not an issue of feminism. It is the behavior of a person who is a part of a society. It is literally part of our DNA. You are not a bad feminist even if you want a random Zoom doctor to think you are hot. I want Jane Fonda’s Zoom doctor to think I am hot, even though we have never met. Wanting everyone to think your hot is, regrettably, the human condition.

I share the desire to untangle personal adornment and male approval—to resist the feeling that your looks are a gallery space and you are a curator of male fantasy. There are so many reasons a woman might want to look good at any moment: for herself, or for the pathologically cruel teenage girls at her bus stop. But oh my god—let me buy two different makeup products and carefully blend them into my eyebrow hairs without having to say I’m doing it for myself! It is not a political act. It is not empowering and it is not harmful. It is the ancient tradition of humans disguising our flaws to try to seduce each other.

“You’re bad if you want to attract the people you find attractive” gorgeously illustrates the way feminism argues itself into irrelevance. It is a deeply sex-negative, conservative idea masquerading as pro-woman—as if by wanting to be desired, you waive your rights to be respected. This is shaming. It creates a feminism that has no place for sex workers—or almost anyone else. And it sets up feminism as a struggle between men and women, instead of a movement to set free people of all genders.

There’s a crucial distinction: Trying to look hot is not sexist. Beauty standards for women are sexist, and often racist. They can feel like a tax on your existence. But focusing feminism on individual women’s beauty choices is as self-defeating as focusing environmental action on plastic straws instead of corporate carbon emissions. You can wonder for years and still not know exactly why you are drawn to a certain style or skirt-length, the look of a winged eyeliner or the smoothness of a waxed leg. It’s compelling, but centering this is also a way of keeping feminism localized on our own small personal choices instead of on issues in which women have no choice: reproductive access, maternal mortality, domestic violence, the gender pay gap.