My notifications have been squirrelly of late too. Guess they’re tweaking the platform again.

You make excellent points and I agree, it is a conundrum. There is something to self presentation as a means to elevate how one feels about oneself. A lot of women drag themselves out of bed, shower, fix their hair, and go all out on makeup when they’re sick as a way to feel better. Or to combat feelings of depression. Or to push past rejection. They get surgery to correct deformities so they don’t get states at. And so forth and so on.

There’s nothing in the world wrong with that. It’s healthy. It seems to work for a lot of women, at least partially if not completely.

There’s also something in the fact that regardless of why women do things, men will believe and insist it is all for them or the reasons focus/center them because they must. This has more to do with men’s obsession of women’s bodies as a public good than reality.

To be clear, we’re not talking about normal, healthy sexual attraction. Barring LGBTQIA+ individuals, women are sexually attracted to men as well. But that attraction for men has not become a society wide obsession defining and measuring femininity for women as it has for men.

So what are women supposed to do with that? We’re under that scrutiny every damn day of our lives. I don’t think we can fix it. Seems like if women abandoned all product, paraphernalia, and looks designed and promoted by the fashion industry and took to wearing potato sacks or jumpsuits men’s obsessive focus would shift but it wouldn’t end. It would be our ankles or our collar bones. How wide the elastic around the waist was compared to the length of our tibias. Does it make the "perfect ratio"? Are all the potato sack labels appropriately spaced? Is the burlap weave too revealing? Does that jumpsuit make your butt look big? Are big butts even attractive? They’re so last season. Don’t you think she’s a little old for that Idaho potato sack? A woman her age should only wear Russett potato sacks. Maybe if she wore sweet potato sacks she wouldn’t be looking like she’s trying to stuff 10 pounds of taters in a 5 pound bag, amirite?

Blah blah blah. It never fucking ends. It took me all of 30 seconds to drift into where the potato sack and jumpsuit commentary was gonna go and go off on that tangent.

I guess the best women can do is to know themselves well enough to know why they’re making the choices they are, decide not to participate in the obsession of women’s bodies, that kind of thing.

In the end, if you’re making a conscious choice about how you’re going to interact with a particular facet of culture, you’re less likely to tumble through the current of it both being harmed and causing harm.

Maybe eventually you’ll find your own path. And then you’ll know.