Jane Doe in Charge

I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now.

There are many things to be said about the reactions to Shane Gillis’ skit on SNL. Set aside the rote theories—sexual puritanism in woke and left-wing culture, and its contradictory feminist impulse: the notion that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants, regardless of the consequences, and that to do so is a sacred individualistic right; that all clothing is devoid of sexual content, and yet, of course, a woman can dress sexually; that a woman can wear whatever she wants; that she can say “fuck you” to moral conventions she derides as conservative; that she can do so while adopting an equally stringent moral code, one that is itself conservative and frankly more vindictive than the ones she professes to hate.

Both answers put women, on an individual level, in a position where they must transform their sexual desirability into goodness—either by making being a whore good, or by denying that they are being whores at all, insisting that what they are doing is simply working out—even though we all know this is an illusion, a lie that hides the reality that women are trying to gain and possess sexual desirability. The progressive drama of emancipation works to elide the baseness of the desire for beauty.

Consider what the athleisure discussion is really about: the ability to individually wear and consume clothing as a product—clothing that all women understand is implicitly sexual, and that all women purchase partially to purchase sexual desirability. Thus the prevalence of shapewear; thus the prevalence of TikToks, selfies, and content that displays their physical prowess, their bodies, and things they are making and lavishing attention on. Exercising is often for mundane, healthy ends, and just as much for beauty and for desirability.

Skintight shapewear is sexual.

We, as individuals, are not deep creatures. We have the same desires, broadly the same goals, and broadly the same values and ideas. We are loving animals, sexual animals, and selfish animals with animalistic desires. Often, when we speak of individualism, we speak of individuals as rich and complicated beings. This romantic notion is a hangover of the 19th and 20th centuries—what Girard called “the romantic lie.” Our desires, our hopes and dreams, which philosophy and theory supposedly describe as grand because they are individual, are actually rote, mundane desires: the desire to be sexually desirable and the desire to be morally good.

Collectivist Illusions

Many of these theories are spun out in the wilds of TikTok. They are not well-developed. They are not cohesive accounts of the world we actually live in. And they do not genuinely attempt to understand phenomena. These are individualistic attempts to participate in collective action, reminiscent of Soviet and Maoist voluntarism.

In 20th-century philosophy and political theory, we supposed that collectivism and individualism are contradictory. In the 21st century, we can see they are the same, precisely because individuals are not deep. Coordinating behavior with shallow beings is far easier than coordinating it with deep, rich individuals—and the deep, rich individual is a relic of the last century.

And so, even though we associate collectivism with the Soviet Union and Maoism, we now see collectivism’s greatest fulfillment in consumer society—where shallow desires are so readily satisfied by market forces that constantly exploit commonly felt individual feelings. Nowhere is this better expressed than in shapewear and athleisure. The personal desire for beauty, to fix all our unique flaws—from pimples here and spots there to a little fat on a tummy’s edge—becomes a potent weapon in a collective struggle, a legitimate social and sexual revolution. The turn to athleisure and away from the dress of the last century is as radical a revolution in fashion as the abandonment of the corset—and that revolution, too, was argued on grounds of health.

We have no institutions left to elevate these desires and appetites toward noble ends; the market and, now, social media algorithms capture them instead. These collectives form to satisfy and defend venal, individualistic desires that are shallow and harmful to the body politic—an insight as ancient as Plato, and thus just as banal, but one we would do well to remember. Here lies the contradiction at the heart of sex politics: the desire for beauty is at once noble and base. It is noble in its object—the wish to be beautiful is as old and as admirable as any human wish—and base in its form: a venal appetite the market stimulates and never satisfies, and which we then dress up as emancipation. Athleisure and sex politics, unlike the personal vendettas and resentments that may animate racial or class politics, are animated by the noble half: the wish to be, become, and remain beautiful. And yet, in that way, they have all the more social power, because the stakes are so much more personally felt than in class and racial politics.

Beauty, and being beautiful, affect daily life. To wear athleisure is, in daily life, to communicate an idea of beauty and a certain pride in oneself. BLM marches on one day for one cause; the DSA organizes one election for one person. But sex politics, at the start of every day, in the moment-to-moment thud of feet on treadmills and ecstatic pleasures of Saturday afternoons, erupts, catapults, and explodes into the mind. Sex defies the episodic nature of most political life.

Politics is, like the individual, shallow: politics is how we decide “who gets what,” just as we could reduce the individual to “what one wants”; sex politics, then, would be “who one gets.” In consumer society, sex politics is demonstrated through what one wants, i.e., what one purchases and earns: clothing and a fit body.

So women “unionize.” Because women have much more to lose than men do in biological sex, as those who bear and rear children and can get pregnant, women are driven—by the shared logic of selfish individualism in the market—to “unionize”: that is, to unite to set standards for sex—just as men, in “patriarchy,” once unionized to control (for much more productive and less selfish ends) the production of the family under peasant, then bourgeois, norms. Modern social media makes possible the vast social coordination of individual women; women can reach shared conclusions rapidly. The commonly shared neuroticism amongst many of these women (who are neurotic because of their bourgeois education as well as their sex, which drives sexual neuroticism) drives these conclusions toward ends that not only benefit women the most but also control men the most, just as unions sought to control bosses. In terms of athleisure, the aims of this collectivist struggle are to guarantee women’s rights to purchase products they consider essential for their beauty; the ability to deny that these products, always marketed for beauty, have anything to do with beauty; and the ability to restrict men from identifying these products as related to beauty, and to sexual desirability more broadly. Why would women, who desire sexual desirability, also desire to not be seen desiring sexual desirability?

True Romance

One could depart here into a commonly held position amongst many men and women, which is that intrasexual competition incentivizes women to make other women uglier. But I think that misreads the logic of consumer society, democracy, and the modern fusion of collectivism and individualism enabled by algorithmic coordination.

The aim is to discipline men: to control men’s desire. The easiest route to controlling men’s desire is for women to deny their own obvious desire for sexual desirability, recasting it as a mundane desire for health or convenience. Of course, a man in this situation then arrives at this whole conversation disempowered: he doesn’t know exactly what women want, but he knows women don’t want to be wanted by him. The poor man is thus knocked off his feet. He thought that beautiful girl with a full face of makeup, wearing a pair of butt-lifting, high-waist, tummy-control, ruched fabric shorts and doing squats was surely interested in desirability: of course not! It’s about her health.

By this method, women feel they retake possession of their actions: though they could be forced to confront their base, animal reality, the desire to rut in the mud and fuck and suck, they restore a pseudo-Christian dignity, as moral and progressive beings, in want of good health. They cast off the biological shackles and restore their sacred dignity, as morally autonomous beings. Women, even more than men, are in love with the idea of themselves as deep and autonomous individuals: this is because women, even more than men, fear biology’s fateful trick, the fertile determinism nesting in their legs. Throughout all our political domains—whether we are looking at the discussion of IQ, of race politics, of immigration, or of classrooms—it is women leading the charge against biological determinism. It is women, not men, who have become radicalized: they have been radicalized against themselves. Often, conservatives express confusion as to why so many liberal women embrace transgender politics. They wonder how feminists, arguing for rights inextricable from sex, such as abortion, could endorse the notion of sex as an immaterial social construct. The answer is, of course, that transgenderism, like abortion, promises escape from one’s biological prison. This shameful utopianism—as we will see—is the engine of the suppression of men.

In one sense, this denial is a deeply conservative, even modest, instinct. A truly liberated feminist would admit that she wears the ruched shorts precisely to show off her great ass. But we are not dealing with truly feminist women. We are dealing with neurotic women, many of whom are unhappy with themselves and their bodies, who have desperately invested time, money, and energy to achieve beauty, and this embarrasses them greatly—because they are culturally Christian, because they are half-educated feminists who are suspicious of male sexual objectification, and because they desperately hate being women and fear that men love them for being women—fearing most of all a man who loves them as women, and not for being “themselves,” as if that could exist separate and apart from their bodies. This explains why we also see a similar phenomenon in conservative and evangelical circles: less about athleisure than pornography, about men’s desire for sex, and their wives’ desire to not have sex—or more precisely, to be loved without being fucked.

They have fully bought into what Girard called “the romantic lie”: the belief that their desires are completely autonomous, independent, and self-directed, and that a deeply felt sense of shame over their bodies and their fate (the biological restrictions of being the birthing sex) must become pride. This affair is tragic: women are buying beauty products en masse; they are more desperate than ever to be beautiful, more fearful of not being beautiful, and more resentful of being forced to be beautiful—so much so that they take out this suppressed pain on men, hoping to achieve with the control of men what they cannot control within themselves. We could even see this as an evolution of what Marcuse called surplus repression: now that we have undergone “the great feminization,” to use Helen Andrews’ words, the libido has gone from an instinct suppressed by capitalism to an instinct turned toward suppression itself, in particular the suppression of men.

What a beautiful example the Cornell story is, then: a woman’s libido, which led her to engage in a confusing orgy, replete with ketamine and progressive fantasy, becomes her private shame, which then leads to the social suppression of all fraternities. For her failure to achieve utopia, all men must pay the price. The athleisure debate is each individual woman’s attempt to “get in on the action,” substituting her ketamine orgy with her well-shaped ass, her libidinal expression, which men desire, thus powering her control over men.

It’s Jane Doe’s world. You’re just living in it.