I am the first to admit that my mind works in random ways. This was once again demonstrated as I sat in a neglected coffee shop not far from my workplace. The long, curly hair of the barista jogged my memory because she had the exact same hair as “Angelica” from six years ago…

Angelica was, way back then, a newly-minted graduate with a BA in comparative lit. She was a moderately-attractive but mercurial and pudgy young woman (full-disclosure: I did sleep with her a few times) who I’m still on friendly terms with today.

There were many aspects of her personality that made her memorable. For starters, Angelica had a habit of surrounding herself with gay men and complaining about the lack of sexual attention she received. (Insert your own joke here.) But one of her most notable characteristics was her possession of a Spidey-Sense for sexism– sexism being whatever she said it was, objective criteria be damned.

Angelica’s paranormal ability would tingle upon detection of subtle gender-calumnies hiding in mundane places where none would appear to be. Surely, she was also emboldened by the discovery that well-timed accusations of oppressing the womenfolk could assist in winning arguments she couldn’t otherwise win on the merits with the cringing eunuchs you could find around campus. Such victories come all the easier for Gender Warriors like her because the “oppressors” are often restrained by chivalrous impulses and don’t fight back very much. (Funny how that works, eh?)

I have to admit, it could be a little disconcerting to watch a white middle-class woman say stuff more befitting a Shining Path guerrilla in the mountains of Peru. But luckily, an English department could indulge her interests quite well. Indeed, it can accomodate anyone whose mind is locked in the fashionable dungeon of postmodern theory, notwithstanding the holes in the walls from the implosion of Paul de Man, the devastating Sokal hoax and other such wrecking-balls. But I digress…

Back to the real story: That evening, Angelica and I were about to go-out for dinner. I was sitting on her couch, waiting for her to finish dressing and emerge from the bedroom. On her coffee table sat a copy of Ms. magazine, the flagship feminist publication (then, with a circulation of 110,000 and falling). I couldn’t resist giving it a quick thumb-through, if only to admire how large portions of a once-formidable movement for gender-equality had slowly degraded over the years into a collection of cult-like circular dogmas with strong tendencies to echo the most shameless forms of sexism. (Many level-headed women, like the Nobel-laureate Doris Lessing, find this “lazy and insidious” spectacle rather deeply embarrassing. Indeed, making a presumption of male perfidy into a cornerstone of one’s belief system seems to be a surefire way of guaranteeing one’s prejudice on the basis of sex.)

While pouring over the magazine, my eye spotted an item in which the contributor fretted that cosmetic surgery had “co-opted the rhetoric of choice.” Well if you haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, it’s often necessary to interpret this stuff into plain English: Cosmetic surgery regards bodily “choice” as not exclusive to the uterus, and therefore “co-opted” it from being “rhetoric” for political rallies.

Whichever way you twist it, I saw this comment as being symptomatic of a paradox which normally gets painted-over by fudges and evasions, all the better to have one’s cake and eat it too. To wit:

1. There is, in almost every flavor of feminism, a sacred mantra of “my body, my choice” in reference to abortion. Not taking a laissez-faire stance towards “choice” precludes one from being a member of the Sisterhood. Over and over it is repeated: What a woman does with her body is HER CHOICE.

2. When cosmetic surgery comes-up, the Sisterhood usually throws the word “choice” out the window. A woman who wants cosmetic surgery is often said to have fallen prey to a genderized-remix of false consciousness, euphemized as ‘patriarchal social norms’, ‘the Beauty Myth’ and other such repackagings. For the master stroke: If the woman insists she’s choosing cosmetic surgery out of genuine desire, the poor flower is in denial to her own oppression.

Very Gnostic, is it not? Normal folks slumber in the The Matrix while the Gender Warriors karate-chop through brick walls like Trinity and Morpheus. (Heaping the hypocrisy even higher: Ignoring a woman’s interpretations of her own experiences is supposedly a terrible sin in the feminist realm. But it’s perfectly okay when they do it, of course.)

So what to make of this mess? Maybe it’s my inferior male brain or my lack of ovaries, but I don’t understand how the two ideas can make much sense together. Please disregard, if you can, your feelings about abortion because they’re irrelevant here. Doesn’t the word “choice” require agency or free will? How can free will apply to elective medical procedures for one’s uterus but not for one’s lips or breasts? Do feminists know what’s going-on in your brain even better than you do? You’d think this is a valid line of questioning, right?

Hah! You would be wrong, my friend. So very, very wrong.

Because six years ago, I sat on Angelica’s couch with exactly these questions. I thought I could ask her to sort it out for me. Surely I was overlooking some nuance? How very gauche I was.

When she walked into the living room, I pointed to the magazine and asked: “Why does the feminist press vociferously object to any attempt to criticize a woman’s “choice” over her own body, but they’ll give a woman serious flak if she chooses cosmetic surgery? Shouldn’t “choice” over one’s body include things beyond the uterus?” I could hear the adding-machine clacking away in her head to run the memorized formulae. After a few seconds, the reply came…

“It’s stupid to compare the two.”

Okey-dokey! Glad she sorted that out. It’s stupid to compare the two. (Why? Because a man is comparing them.)

Rather foolishly, I didn’t shut-up about the incoherent philosophical position she was side-stepping: “Hold on, at the risk of oversimplifying, let me get this straight. This magazine says that women’s true identities and authentic desires are often supplanted by mass-media, advertising and culturally-prescribed notions of what a woman should be, thus pressuring them to want uncomfortable shoes and diet fads and so on. But amid all these artificial female desires, if a woman says she wants an abortion how can you– or anyone at Ms– suddenly claim it’s an untainted choice?” I tried not to snicker. “My dear, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t work both sides of the street. You can’t have your cake and-”

“It’s. Stupid. To. Compare. Them.” She repeated more forcefully. Logic can be so pesky sometimes.

From that point on, her mood towards me changed and– long story short– she never slept with me again. I guess a man doesn’t look too hot if he punctures your bag of wind.

Six years later, part of me still finds her almost-comical dodge of the matter to be a source of wonderment. Another part of me sees it as symptomatic of the psychological dynamics of religious sects wherein the intellectual flimsiness underlying a flawed creed must be obscured with paltry ad hoc assertions, much in the same way a Creationist might rationalize the existence of dinosaur fossils: “Satan hid them in the rocks to trick us!”

Anyway, to reiterate the paradox: In feminist circles, if a woman says she wants an abortion or birth-control (or even a sex toy), it is HER CHOICE; someone who critiques HER CHOICE is all but forced to wear sackcloth and ashes. But when a woman chooses to have a shot of Botox? That’s different. Such a woman– to quote the nutcase Valerie Solanas– ranks among the dismissible legions of “mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s girls.”

It really does takes my breath away. I’m not playing word-games or trying to be funny. It brings-up very serious ontological questions about free will which undermine what everybody agrees to be sacred accomplishments: Free will is an absolute must if women are capable of voting and signing contracts and serving on juries and thousands of other things. Right? If you insist that a woman who casts a vote in an election truly wants to cast it and a woman who signs a contract truly wants to sign it, how can you start saying that the same woman wants a cosmetic procedure because she saw it on TV?

Confused? Don’t be. Here’s what’s actually going on… If you’ve ever read the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the above paradox is a real example of doublethink: Needing to believe conflicting ideas to advance the Party Line. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. My choice but it’s not.

So what is the true principle at work? I’ll tell you. Here is the core, the pith, the linchpin, the whole point: If straight men like it, it’s BAD. Just remember that, and everything makes sense. So help me, it is the only key which fits in all the locks.

We saw a similar example some months ago when the Phoenix/Scottsdale chapter of NOW argued that a giant Victoria’s Secret display dehumanized women by emphasizing their body parts. Well, you can bet your bottom dollar that these same gender-commissars would flock to admire Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party– a groundbreaking exemplar of feminist art– in which stylized vaginas on dinner plates are framed by forks and knives. (Again, here is the only constant: If straight men like it, it’s BAD.)

Ladies and gents, I’m sorry for this long rant but I really can’t stand this kind of hypocritical, sanctimonious control-freak-ism– which would be instantly denounced if a man did it– by self-anointed “experts” who convince themselves that they are so endowed with clear-vision that they can judge and scold the decisions of other adults. The right to make informed decisions without having self-selected know-it-alls breathing down your neck is an important badge of adulthood. Robbing other women of this is, in a word, infantilizing. And yet it’s done with total nonchalance. If they want your opinion, they’ll tell you what it is.

If your head isn’t spinning by now, this will surely do the trick: It turns-out that feminist rhetoric can be invoked to justify breast implants! If you find the July, 1997 issue of Playboy magazine, there’s an article entitled “Stacked Like Me,” penned by a Jan Breslauer, former teacher of “gender theory” at Yale’s divinity school. This article frames the author’s own implants as nothing less than a bold act of liberation. Breslauer writes: “Sure, I know the party line on breast augmentation — that women who have the surgery are the oppressed victims of a patriarchal culture,” she comments, using the frank term “party line” no less(!) But she goes-on to say that such a “moldy notion” is so passé. Furthermore:

“Today, it stands more as a sign that women have gained power, that they’ve become subjects rather than objects of history… The boob job has become the latest expression of the American love of self-creation… You can rail at an imperfect world, or go get yourself a great pair of bazongas.”

Isn’t it convenient to have an ideology which turns on a dime to mean whatever the heck you want it to mean? It’s especially handy if logic is an inconvenience. The whole harangue about cosmetic surgery as a sign of brainwashing? A BS-laden pose. That is all ye need know.

But I, for one, commend Breslauer for having the independence of mind (and free will!) to break out of the ideological constraints which caused the benighted Angelica to decide I wasn’t so great in bed after all.

Just as well. She got offended by the messages floating in her Alpha Bits, for Chrissake.

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