The Positive Link

Judgement and conspicuous compliance

Recently, I was watching a tiktok where a young woman spoke quite passionately about a flare of controversy shooting up from the flaming heap of online cultural conversation. It wasn’t about politics, it was about how a woman chose to portray herself in a work of art.

This young woman had opinions.

I had a reaction, a swift flash of judgement that mirrored the passion of the woman on the small screen.

I tried to figure out why this video irked me. Maybe because I’m still figuring out how to use social media effectively and this woman clearly knows how to do that. Her intense conviction, rapid fire delivery, artfully torn jeans (which we could see because her knee was drawn up to her chin, which struck me as a mannered posture), was tiktok ready, and it’s clear why she has a large following.

I noticed my judgement at a conventionally attractive young, thin, white woman with long hair and very heavy make-up questioning norms around female appearance and sexual expression.

My internal judgement is a warning sign to me, and I got curious about it. Surely we all get to show up as we want in the world, whether we choose to conform to accepted norms or not. Don’t we? It got me thinking about ways in which we judge ourselves and others, ways in which we all, male and female, subtly or overtly critique the ways in which other people move through the world.

Woman have always been judged for how they move through the world, especially around their appearance. Rebecca Solnit, in her memoir The Faraway Nearby, writes about how her mother was always, in some way, competing with her. Solnit, who was born a year before I was, had a mother the same generation as mine, and I recognized that constant maternal calculus in the mother/daughter dynamic, a score-keeping around appearance, accomplishment and attention.

We’re taught it young, competition, and it is often centered around appearance. Who is younger, thinner, more attractive, or, in Solnit’s case, naturally blonde, a fact that irked her mother.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, was recently on the podcast Money With Katie talking about beauty being the one power women could openly pursue without censure, but they could never own it.

In the conversation, they referenced the work of Kate Manne and the concept of “conspicuous compliance” – where women demonstrate their compliance with gender norms to get closer to power, and are rewarded for the effort to comply, even when it’s not successful. Cottom cites research that a woman who applies makeup ineffectively gets more social “points” for effort than the woman who chooses to wear no make-up at all.

Cottom says when she writes, as she often does, about the meaning behind someone’s appearance, she is chided by some on the left because we aren’t “supposed” to discuss or critique another woman’s body. But, Cottom says, when the way a woman chooses to alter or present her body has overtly cultural or political context, we get to name it. She talks about Kristi Noem’s wardrobe choices while visiting a detention center and she and the host Katie Gatti Tassin talk about women who have had extensive and quite obvious plastic surgery to conform to specific beauty standards. Cottom says the obvious nature of the alterations to face, skin, lips and appearance is the point, it is about women demonstrating that they will undergo body modification to signal their compliance to the appearance desired by the people in power, in this case, Trump. The women around him look similar, slight variations on the same restrictive theme.

Which brings me back to my sense of irritation at the young woman on tiktok talking about another young woman’s right to portray herself as she chooses in public. My internal desire to avoid talking about women’s bodies or appearance, runs up against the fact that a young woman demonstrating conspicuous compliance in her artfully crafted physical presentation creates a notable cognitive dissonance for me.

Then I realized that this lengthy video, in which this woman opined on many things, made scant reference to anyone else’s thoughts or work. Yes, she held up a book briefly at the end of the video and made a passing reference to its content. But I realized part of my irritation was wondering how anyone could talk at length about women and pornography, art, commerce and the objectification and exploitation of the female body and not quote one single woman. Cottom, Andrea Dworkin, Silvia Federici immediately came to my mind.

We should find, read, credit and quote people, especially women, who have written about subjects that interest us. Especially if we are going to opine on it publicly. The information is so readily available. ChatGPT is right there and even a simple google search will suffice.

In referencing scholars, activists, artists and thinkers who came before us we highlight a long history of resistance, learning, challenging and fighting against the tools of oppression: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, racism, colonialism. We’ve been fighting these things for a long time, and we’ve learned along the way, tools and perspectives and maps that are readily available in the digital libraries at our fingertips.

One of the few good things about social media is the link, the connection to other ways of thinking, a new perspective, a different approach, the writer I didn’t know about. Often that link is made in protest, in disagreement, or opposition. Which is valid. And, course, outrage is the engine of social media.

But this week, as I found the podcast, and the interview, and then Kate Manne’s work, all referenced above, I was eagerly reading and listening to this whole stream of new ideas. I realized the thrill of the positive link, the excited sense of look what I found, read this, that also shows up in social media. So, I thought I’d share some of those positive links.