In Soviet Russia, prisoners were grossly underfed in forced labor camps called Gulags. Again, in Nazi Germany, Jewish prisoners were starved. This hunger seemed to serve a dual purpose. With underfeeding, fewer resources needed to be procured. Additionally: starving prisoners are easy to control. They are tired, they can’t fight back, and they can’t run away.

They can’t work at maximum capacity, either — in these cases, the capacity to control and exploit took precedence.

I see the same control strategy, more subtle but also more pernicious, in American ideals for White women’s bodies. It would be easy to mistake beauty norms — cyclically shifting, like names or cars or clothing — as an unfortunate but ultimately shallow kind of decoration. But, as many have already pointed out, these cycles are not random.1

Rather suspiciously, they frequently align with or follow significant feminist wins:

1. First Wave: After suffragettes worked tirelessly throughout the 1910s, women gained the right to vote in 1920. In the 1920s, skinny bodies were deemed beautiful. This was the so-called flapper era. At the same time, wealth inequality increased dramatically, inspiring The Great Gatsby. Women were undereating, and capitalism was ramping up. The feminist movement continued. Women gained greater social and sexual freedom.2

2. Second Wave: Second wave feminism flowed through the 1960s and 1970s. The birth control pill became available in 1960. Kennedy signed The Equal Pay Act in 1963. Title IX was passed in 1972, and Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973. Yet, in the 60s and 70s, Twiggy was on the scene. A generalized skinny ideal persisted throughout these two decades. Like the 1920s, the 1970s saw increased social and sexual freedoms for women.

3. Third Wave: The early 1990s cemented third wave feminism. Intersectionality came into the scene, and 1992 is famously deemed The Year of the Woman. The number of women in the U.S. Senate tripled. Woman-forward media expanded. In 1993, marital rape was finally made illegal in all fifty states. At the same time, heroin-chic became a global phenomenon. In 1998, the bar for having an “overweight” BMI shifted from ~27 to 25, for reasons that didn’t have much basis in health data. Despite increasing obesity rates, skinniness continued to be popular into the early 2000s. Among celebrities, hip bones flourished.

The pattern of skinnification following activism has persisted to the present day.

Skinny beauty ideals alongside fourth-wave feminism

We now live within the second act of fourth wave feminism, which has run through the 2010s and 2020s.

The 2010s saw the Body Positivity Movement. During this period, feminism became popular and marketable. Being a Girlboss was in. So-called “hookup culture” peaked. Blogification democratized — and, in some ways, diluted — various feminist ideologies. Delightful new terms, such as “mansplaining,” “manspreading,” and “slut shaming,” grew and prospered. LGBTQ+ acceptance increased dramatically. Awareness of intersectionality grew, and it became common to talk about racist microaggressions, such as the entitlement people feel to touch Black women’s hair. It felt, at the time, as though we had made it. It seemed like we were close to the end of history.

In 2017, the #MeToo Movement shattered the illusion of completion. It became clear — to many men, for the first time — that sexual assault is painfully common.

Famous men got outed. People debated about what we should do, and who we should forgive. In alignment with this, the Black Lives Matter movement peaked in 2020, when George Floyd was strangled by a police officer on camera. Black Lives Matter shrunk in 2021. The Body Positivity Movement retreated in 2022. Women’s bodies followed. Slowly, thin began to creep back in.

Since the 2020s, feminism has shifted to include a stronger anti-capitalist bent. There’s a backlash — which I, personally, deem excessively strong — against Girlboss feminism. Bucolic tradwife content has grown like ivy on our online ecosystem. Trump is stumbling through his second term, and in early 2026, the Epstein files were released. It became clear that powerful men had been taking advantage of children and teenagers for decades.

Now, more than 50% of women identify as feminists. At the same time, there is a festering anti-feminist backlash among young men. At the same time, talking heads preach patriarchal values. At the same time, AI servants take on a feminine likeness. At the same time, celebrities are skinnier than ever.

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GLP-1s in the 2020s

GLP-1s came onto the popular stage in the 2020s. No one was forced to reach a starvation-sheek aesthetic, via these fun new drugs. Yet, some have gone for the look, regardless. The past year has been particularly bad. I’m saddened to see some popular figures begin to take on a likeness not completely unlike concentration camp victims.3

As of mid-2026 Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Demi Moore, and Olivia Wilde all show pronounced chest bones. They exhibit temporal wasting (i.e. sunken temples), which is a classic signal of malnourishment. They don’t quite look like concentration camp victims — but they aren’t all that far off, either. Perhaps the loud glamour of the red carpet — consisting of hair extensions, glitter, black eyeliner, limousines, lipstick, and experimental modern silhouettes — works to conceal a vivid lack.

GLP-1s enable this shrinking, but they do not fully explain it. These drugs have been accessible to celebrities since the early 2020s. But, as of 2026, the bony smallification has grown quite a bit more pronounced. Why? When I ask this, one word sticks out.

Control

Starvation — and, to a lesser degree, general thinness — makes people more controllable, for obvious reasons. Low-BMI individuals are less equipped to physically defend themselves, in general. They have reduced muscle mass; high muscle mass and an underweight BMI are incompatible (in fact, many fit-looking athletes are overweight by BMI). Starving comes with its own set of symptoms: frailty, low energy, brain fog, anxiety, low emotional regulation, cerebral atrophy, cognitive rigidity, obsessive food preoccupation, and social withdrawal.

These symptoms occur regardless of circumstance. They don’t recede at the sight of a red carpet. And I venture to say they might dissuade someone from starting a feminist movement. Similarly, running for office or writing a novel would be off the table.

It goes without saying that being a celebrity is extraordinarily different than being Jewish in Hitler’s Germany. The social conditions that coerce hunger are not the same, in each case. In concentration camps, prisoners starve due to physical force, walls, gates, deprivation, inadequate clothes for harsh weather, and isolation. These are blunt mechanisms of control.

The mechanisms that might encourage modern, well-off women in the US to starve themselves are more amorphous; a hodge-podge of social incentives, pressures, and influences are at play. Affected individuals have relevant autonomy. Most women at least appear to have choice in whether to starve themselves or not, and choose not to.4 But the scope of the pressure is immense. It impacts the entire population, to a greater or lesser degree.

Among these social pressures, we should list the ordinary culprits: media, parents, peers, and employers. The media can define and show what is desirable. Parents pass on intergenerational narratives about what makes women worthwhile. Peers can exclude. Employers can and do chronically underpay on the basis of arbitrary traits. These are informal social control mechanisms.

Some of these mechanisms might seem subtle, at first glance. Compliments, for example, can be controlling. Calling compliments a “mechanism of control” might seem to be an overreaction. But if a little girl is only praised for her beauty or meekness, what do you reckon that does to her sense of self?

The conglomerate of compliments over time has causal weight, alongside overt violence, media pressure, and employer discrimination.5 The strength of these mechanisms varies by subculture. In Mormonism, women are taught they cannot get into heaven without attracting and keeping a man. In this pursuit, their beauty is valued above all else.

This includes thinness. Before ex-Mormonist left the church, she spent quite a lot of her cognitive effort moderating her own appetite for the sake of maintaining a skinny ideal. In a YouTube video about beauty standards within the Mormonism, she says:

The quest to be thin wasn’t just a hobby. It wasn’t just a passive interest of mine. My entire life—and eternity—depended on it. Inside the Mormon church, we had a belief that man and women couldn’t go to heaven without one another. To be in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom, which was everybody’s goal—to become like God—you had to be married, with the new and everlasting covenant.

Gage reports that, in her church community, women who failed to meet these strict beauty standards were socially excluded. To a lesser degree, this is true everywhere. The incentives that drive women to stay skinny, wear makeup, buy designer clothes, get hair extensions, get plastic surgery, etc. are real — they don’t amount to mere vanity.

The cost of pursuing these things is also quite real. Time spent counting calories is time not spent learning, engaging in activism, or leaving an abusive spouse. If restriction is extreme, the brain fog of starvation is thrown into the mix of downsides. Both literal and metaphorical muscle whither.

Proposed mechanisms from feminist wins to skinny beauty ideals

Earlier, I pointed out a striking correspondence between landmark feminist wins and a return to skinny ideals. But I admit I’m a little fuzzy on which causal, systemic mechanisms would lead to a change in ideals following these rapid social transformations. If anyone would like to comment on this, I would appreciate it.

I do have useful speculation. I believe the pressure to be extremely thin is part of the standard pushback against feminist movements. Anti-feminist backlash has existed for as long as feminist movements have occurred. As the optimist says, life is a dance: “Two steps forward, one step back.”

Change has a habit of being uncomfortable. It may be that, when it becomes more acceptable for women to be in power, people of all backgrounds and stripes experience heightened discomfort when viewing the resultant powerful women. Discomfort with female power is a well-documented phenomenon. For example: politicians are perceived either positively or negatively for seeking power, depending on gender. Which gender is rewarded for power-hungry tendencies — and which is not — should be evident.

Perhaps this discomfort subtly increases the desire within individuals to watch women who appear weak, girlish, and submissive. Skinny, wide-eyed celebrities have an excessively youthful appearance. Twiggy, for instance, looked childlike. She had big, kid-like eyes, and long, kid-like limbs. Ariana Grande also seems childish. After losing weight, she has adopted an uncharacteristically sweet, innocent persona.

If the desire to see mirages of passivity and innocence increases within many individuals, the in-demand aesthetic itself might shift.

Celebrities change themselves for exposure, on the basis of these subtle desire shifts in their audience. Women see the celebrities. Women want to mirror the celebrities, and attempt to do so, with varying degrees of success. The popularity of various celebrities grows or wanes on the basis of the desire zeitgeist. When a celebrity is popular, more people see them, and revise their concept of desirability to fit. It’s all a vicious cycle between gazers and those who are gazed at.

In short, I propose the following factors are among the mechanisms that lead feminist wins to thinness:

1. Discomfort is induced by social change

2. Viewing choices are altered towards weakness due to this discomfort

3. Celebrity presentation is warped to cater to altered audience preference

4. Celebrity popularity grows or wanes on the basis of viewer preference

5. Viewer behavior changes to mimic popular celebrities

6. Viewer preference is further altered by what is shown to be popular

7. Repeat

I’m not married to any one mechanism.6 But I believe the suggestion I offer here is, at the very least, somewhat plausible. It might be part of the bigger causal pie.

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A call to keep the self big

Those with female bodies generally have less upper body strength than those with male ones. But choices are still quite relevant. People of either gender who choose to prioritize strength are less physically vulnerable.

But when I suggest the self be big, I don’t only mean the body. We’ve recently been inundated with a glaringly neutral, beige aesthetic. It leaves little room for creativity and self-expression. In response, I’d like to offer up a general call to not shrink — to be weird, disagreeable, annoying, sturdy, opinionated, inconvenient, and loud.

A poem called “Close Your Legs And Cross Your Ankles” has been bookmarked on my browser for a few years. It’s published by Rejection Letters, and authored by Leigh Camacho Rourks. In this segment, she evokes the unwillingness to be small:

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I am the Atlantic, I carve land and birth islands and
float ships and I drown men and I drown women and
I drown you, too. I am not afraid, you listen

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here. I will not be smaller and smaller and smaller. I will not
be small. I cannot be contained, I am forest. I am unsafe
for you, you listen here. I am a black hole and I eat and eat
and eat, I crunch light in my teeth and exhale darkness
and I grow and I am not afraid. My mark
is strong. I spread wide.

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You listen here, I will not be crossed
and folded. I will not be shaped to suit the size
of a thing, not a house, not a rule, not a cupboard, not
a drawer, not a form, ideal. I will
not dainty to fit. I will not meek for you.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I will not afraid.

I wanted to write about something general and abstract this week. I wanted to write about merely verbal disputes, the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects, social epistemology, or something else of that sort. But it feels impossible. Circumstances I won’t disclose have led to a mess of the following questions instead: “How and when does someone report assault? Can restorative justice work for things that are not trivial? How does patriarchy seep into seemingly benevolent spiritual speech? What does it mean to take responsibility?”

Lovely philosophers have worked on these questions. I haven’t encountered an answer that feels satisfactory, yet, possibly because no intellectual response would feel viscerally satisfactory. Am I, a self-proclaimed moral nihilist, desperately looking for a universal decree? Camus would call this gap absurdity.1

The best I could coherently accomplish, by my own world view, would be a pragmatic shorthand. If I’m a human animal and want to keep other human animals around me happy, I might find some slogans to shout out at the correct intervals. We all seem better off with the concept of bodily sovereignty, for example, so I’m very inclined to say stuff such as, “you own your body,” in a voice of absolute conviction. On other occasions, I might say, “the scope of identity is a choice,” with just as much conviction. This is Daoist. Identify with the whole, and the thing that is identified with does not seem to die.

On neither of these occasions will I mention moral nihilism, or nihilism about the property ‘ownership.’ The mention of nihilism doesn’t seem to be in the medicine, so I, conveniently, omit it. I don’t include my skepticism about the metaphysical relevance of chosen identity scope, either. I simply allow myself to engage in speech acts that I believe will help women walk around in the world with more confidence and less fear.

I endeavor to look for more useful pragmatic shorthands, over time. If an utterance makes it easier to get out of bed, I’ll keep it in a box. The phrase, “my actions will not lead to any lasting ramifications due to the eventual heat death of the universe,” is in the box. So is, “it is absolutely essential that I attend the meeting I said I’d go to now or everything will go to hell.” The former can be helpful if the reason for inaction is a sense of overwhelming pressure from the responsibility to take certain actions but not others. The latter, though often a bit too aggressive, might be helpful if the problem is an overarching sense of aimlessness.

To total newcomers, philosophy is stereotyped as the search for the so-called “meaning of life.” But if you ask a modern analytic philosopher if their work has helped them find the meaning of life, they’ll probably laugh at you. If I wanted to be a smartass, I’d say, “The answer is in the laughter.” It would sound awful nice. It would be a play on a passage from the Tao Te Ching:2

When the wise hear of the Tao,
They immediately follow it.
When the conventional hear,
They wonder if it’s true.
When the foolish hear,
They laugh out loud.
If there were no laughter,
It wouldn’t be the Tao.

I don’t want to be a smartass. I don’t know if the answer is in the laughter or not. I don’t know if it’s useful to think that the answer is in the laughter. I don’t know if the phrase, “The answer is in the laughter,” can go in the box.

Instead, my mind drifts back to Ella Fitzgerald, singing, in all earnestness, “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.” When I was a teenager, I thought this song was silly. Now, a part of me thinks it’s about as good as we’re going to get, when it comes to instructions that allow us to build a feeling of meaningfulness without convolution or dishonesty. To focus on the swing is to attend not to what is done, but the quality in the doing. It pertains not to what you believe is true, but the zest in the belief.

Nietzsche instructs people to choose their highest hope, and act toward that, wholeheartedly and without moderation, despite the lack of an overarching morality. Metaphysically, his instruction seems indistinguishable from moral nihilism. But, boy, does he add dramatic flair.3

With Nietzsche’s pro-emotion sentiment, I drift back into questions about the patriarchy. I feel into my animal body, and all I can think is that the air smells strange. It smells like underhanded tactics. It smells like God, gone bad. It smells like men who believe they deserve to have their hands around a woman’s neck. It smells like Epstein. It smells like men who think they ought to have access to teenagers, who do not care at all about their healthy development.

It smells like women getting skinny. It smells like weak arms that can’t push back. It smells like excuses. It smells like covert discomfort with female leadership dressed as fair backlash against Girl Boss feminism. It smells like milk, from a cow. It smells like eggs, from a chicken. It smells like sourdough, baked by a fake trad wife, through a smell-less screen. It smells like the mirage of a farm, like pure bucolic heaven that breaks into a pile of a million pixels. I don’t like it.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Epistemic injustice is the act of suppressing groups of people by disrupting their capacity to know, speak, or be taken seriously. This includes, but is not limited to:

1. Restricting access to vital information

2. Failing to believe the accounts of those with direct experiences of an event when belief is warranted

3. Using complex terms specifically for the purpose of exclusion

4. Deeming speakers of one language to be more knowledgeable than speakers of another

5. Systematically withholding educational resources

6. Purposefully seeding misinformation into the public sphere

7. Denying individuals authority on the basis of traits such as gender or race

8. Appropriating material created by an oppressed group without proper citation, attribution, or respect for the original context

9. Providing a perspective of history that hides the violence perpetuated by dominant groups in public secondary school

10. Maintaining an economic system that forces many individuals to stay in survival mode to such an extent that they have no time to deeply criticize the economic system in question

All of these things happen. Fricker (2007) identified two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutic. Testimonial injustice occurs when unfair bias reduces the credibility a listener assigns to a speaker. When activists asserted that we should “believe women” during the #MeToo movement, they were trying to counteract testimonial injustice.

Hermeneutic injustice, on the other hand, is characterized by situations in which the standardized conceptual and linguistic resources available are inadequate for understanding or explaining specific experiences of oppression. For example: before the term “sexual harassment” was circulated, it was challenging to explain experiences of sexual harassment. Both types of injustice require reflection to comprehend.

The Trump administration has done something far less covert; at the beginning of his second term, they simply deleted data related to homophobia, transphobia, and gender-based violence. They retracted reports from the CDC website, among other government sites.

In addition, policy analysts Lauren Bouton and Elana Redfield found that a conservative estimate of “360 different federal data collections” had been removed or altered over the first year of Trump’s second presidency. They searched for these altered collections over 2025 and 2026, and expect to find more. Many of these shifts were done under the guise of “non-substantive” alterations, which require no review period. Replacing the word “gender” with “sex,” for example, was deemed a non-substantive alteration.

These acts should have been obvious. Perhaps they were. Nevertheless, I, perennially ignorant, only found out this month. In an attempt to write a research-based article on the intersection between neurodivergence and sexual violence, I noticed the data I wished to pull up wasn’t quite as forthcoming as I expected it to be. The act of searching felt vaguely akin to grasping for your glasses where they usually are on the nightstand and finding a fistful of air. A friend informed me of the CDC take-downs.

A case study in intentionally broken links

Consider the following 2013 article from the National LGBTQ Task Force: “Bisexual Women have Increased Risk of Intimate Partner Violence, New CDC Data Shows.” This piece cites a CDC report for the statistic that 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced rape, partner violence, or stalking. This report is not easily available. The link that is supposed to map to this report redirects to a page that states: “The page you were looking for has moved.” The reader is not informed of any place this page might have moved to. The other link—whose label indicates it regards the 2010 data taken by the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS)—leads to a page that says: “The page you’re looking for was not found.” In short, both links lead to a virtual ghost.

Most people, I gander, would give up on attempting to verify a source at this point. This archetypical reader, who is horribly busy, would never learn about the methodology that led to the statistic in question. They would instead leave, unsure if the article they just read was backed up by quality research. But I can be obsessive and stubborn. I tried to find this strangely evasive report—and, additionally, where the original data was housed.

A quick Google search reveals a 2011 summary of the 2010 data on the CDC website, but no actual report. I downloaded this summary. It does not mention any data on rates of sexual violence against the LGBTQ+ population.

When I did not search for “CDC” but focused specifically on the term “NISVS,” I was able to find a brief fact sheet summarizing the data from the 2010 survey, as it pertains to the LGBTQ+ population. It includes the 61.1% statistic. But this fact sheet was made available through the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence website. It is not available through the CDC. And by itself, it’s inadequate; it does not include analysis or data-collection methodology.

After Googling to the best of my ability, I attempted to check the NISVS index on the CDC website. It’s supposed to function like a table of contents. As of May 28th, 2026, it states, verbatim:

Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website to its version as of 12:00 AM on January 29, 2025. Information on this page may be modified and/or removed in the future subject to the terms of the court’s order and implemented consistent with applicable law. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from truth. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.

For context, the CDC is a department within the HHS. After taking down CDC reports, the Trump Administration was sued by Doctors for America, among others. This resulted in a substantial (but incomplete) restoration of removed material. Still, the report I was looking for wasn’t available on the index.

As a last-ditch effort to find this elusive report, I asked Anthropic’s Claude for assistance. I gave it the information I had: the 2011 summary, the broken links, the original article, the context. Despite hallucinating a little bit, it allowed me to parse the data trail. The original data from 2010 is distributed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Because it contains qualitative reports with information that might enable someone to identify individuals, it’s only available to those with special permissions. The report I had long sought after, which analyzes how the 2010 data pertains to the LGBTQ+ population in particular, was published in 2013.

After asking Claude multiple times, I found that this mythical 2013 report still exists, despite being nearly impossible to find through Google. It rents an apartment in the CDC stacks. The CDC stacks do not include “gender-based violence” as one of the main categories advertised on the home page, but by using keywords from the already-found report, it is discoverable through the CDC stacks search function.

Alas — before searching, I hadn’t been truly privy to the CDC stacks. It had taken multiple hours and an annoying headache to parse approximately what was going on with the help of artificial intelligence. Without it, I don’t think I would have been able to find the report at all. It all feels eerily similar to a classic passage from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Existence and searchability are different things. Old links broke. In this case, it wasn’t an accident. The Trump administration could have re-instated the 2013 report with the same old link, but chose not to. Centralized, authoritative indexes got neutered. Since Google-ability depends on the connections between pages, deleting digital papers and putting them back up under a different label makes a difference. It makes old articles look unjustified to the casual eye.

Analysis: hermeneutic and testimonial injustice in Trump’s actions

Pushback against the Trump Administration has been partially successful. Lovely humans at educational institutions and volunteer networks worked to save data before it was deleted, which underscores the role these institutions play in helping us remember. The result, as far as I can tell, is a kind of scattering. Some bits of information settle into a different place in the brain of the country, like words that almost but do not quite fall off the tip of the tongue. I worry about holistic dementia.

We rely, often without noticing, on the way in which information transfers between people. We rely on other people to count things that need to be counted, to tell the right people when they’ve finished counting via a network, and to frame the result in a useful way. Trump’s administration has managed to manipulate the counting, the network, and the frame.

They’ve changed the way we count by changing the questions that will later be asked. For instance: the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) will no longer inquire into the gender identity of victims and perpetrators. This will make it harder to know about violence committed against trans and non-binary people. They’ve altered the network by breaking links, as discussed. They’ve disrupted the framing by swapping key terms. If the word “gender” is replaced by “sex,” data that was originally intended to be about the identity of study participants may later appear to be about chromosomes, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics.

Whether the reader cares more about what can be observed from the neck down than personal identity is irrelevant. What matters is that this swap both substantially mangles the intended meaning of the original document, and, functionally, delegitimizes a conceptual recourse: the term ‘gender.’

It used to be that the term ‘sex’ fuzzily encompassed biological sex, social role, and gender identity. When groups of people began to repurpose old terms in a manner that allowed speakers to more clearly differentiate the concepts BIOLOGICAL SEX and GENDER IDENTITY (with the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender identity,’ respectively), a new conceptual resource was made available; the shift in term-use made it easier for people to explain experiences they’d previously lacked easy language for.

Thus, by changing the word “gender” to “sex,” I believe the Trump administration is engaging in testimonial and hermeneutic injustice, simultaneously, in one suave swap:

1. Testimonial injustice: warped the testimonies of the subjects studied by changing the meaning of the text to something the original authors did not intend

2. Hermeneutic injustice: reduced the institutional backing of a conceptual resource needed to explain an important human experience

All of this comes under the cover of a “non-substantive” alteration. In comparison to more colorful forms of violence, I can see how it would seem non-substantive—just a little thing, snuck in.

References

1. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

2. National LGBTQ Task Force. (2013). Bisexual women have increased risk of intimate partner violence, new CDC data shows. https://www.thetaskforce.org/news/bisexual-women-have-increased-risk-of-intimate-partner-violence-new-cdc-data-shows/

3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). The page you were looking for has moved [Redirected page]. Retrieved May 28, 2026, from https://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

4. Bouton, L., & Redfield, E. (2026). Removal of sexual orientation and gender identity data from federal data collections. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/sogi-data-collection-removal/

5. Black, M. C., Basile, K. C., Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Walters, M. L., Merrick, M. T., Chen, J., & Stevens, M. R. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 summary report. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/11637

6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025). NISVS documentation [Page containing court-ordered restoration notice]. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved May 28, 2026, from https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/index.html

7. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. (n.d.). National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2010 [Restricted-access dataset]. National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. Retrieved May 28, 2026, from https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/NACJD/studies/34305

8. Walters, M. L., Chen, J., & Breiding, M. J. (2013). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 findings on victimization by sexual orientation. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/12362

9. Adams, D. (1979). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books.

10. Nietzel, M. T. (2025, February 9). Harvard, others saving data as Trump's team scrubs federal webpages. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/02/09/harvard-others-saving-data-as-trumps-team-scrubs-federal-webpages/

11. Quinn, A. (2026, May 7). 'Things were going dark left and right': The race to save US government datasets before they're deleted. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/07/save-government-datasets-deleted

12. Meyer, I. H., Redfield, E., Bouton, L. J. A., & Flores, A. R. (2026). Erasure of anti-trans violence data in the United States. Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/ncvs-sogi-data-removal/

13. Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5), 1053–1075. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1864376

To begin to understand any human practice, it’s useful to imagine oneself to be an alien observing the practice for the first time.

1. Countries: boundaries across space that groups of people collectively hallucinate and the people or institutions within those hallucinated boundaries.

2. Parties: areas of spacetime in which at least three homo sapiens gather intentionally for this mysterious agenda called “fun.”

3. Noodles: ground up grain or rice that has been formed into symmetrical, skinny forms which are designed specifically to be snapped easily before being boiled and nearly impossible to eat with a fork after-the-fact, for reasons that have nothing to do with nutritional value.

Makeup. When I put on a bit of makeup for the first time in a decade a few months ago, I felt like an alien. I’d forgotten that a significant percentage of women adorn their face in myriad powders and gels either daily, regularly, or on special occasions — for the sake of altering their likeness. This fact felt newly bewildering; I’d nearly forgotten about makeup for the decade I wasn’t wearing it. For the sake of understanding, bewilderment is the beginning.

In explanations of makeup use, convenient non-answers are frequently provided. People say, “enhance your natural features,” in a breathy way that makes coloring in your face seem natural, like walking or eating. Women oftentimes say, “I do it for myself,” in response to the accusation that they are attempting to be more attractive, or to otherwise give a different impression to others than their plain face would. I find this response to be uncompelling — mostly because I suspect that human beings hardly ever do anything solely for themselves. We are a hyper-social species. Without other human beings, I would stop doing entirely. How can we do a thing only for ourselves?

The prospect of putting on makeup for oneself is more bewildering than doing most things for oneself, for one glaring reason: while going through life, we, for the most part, cannot see our own faces.

Narcissus stared in a pool all day, but he drowned. Most of us have to swim, and we kill the mirror surface with our movement. So, if the experience of beauty were desired, it would be best to go to an art museum or a forest. If creative generativity were desired, it would be best to paint a picture, write a poem, build a sculpture, etc.

Creativity lies on a spectrum. Elaborate, novel face paint is incredibly creative. It’s no less creative than any art. Conversely, “no-makeup makeup,” is quite constrained and non-expressive, despite taking impressive technical skill. Choosing an eyeshadow color is a little micro-jolt of agency akin to picking a shirt. It might give someone a bit of confidence in their ability to choose for the remainder of the day, but it hardly compares to composing a symphony. At best, creativity is only part of the explanation for daily makeup wear.

Unless we do actually plan to stare in a mirror all day, the remaining explanations for make-up use involve, in one way or another, the gaze of a secondary being. The gaze needn’t come from a man. The gaze needn’t be about sex. The gaze might even be envisioned.

Internalized Gaze

Someone may feel and act differently because they imagine some hypothetical person will believe they look better.

One variant of this hypothetical person is the internalized male gaze. Women are frequently conditioned to imagine themselves from the outside rather than experience life directly. To wear makeup might feel pleasant to someone conditioned in this way because her internalized external judge approves of how she imagines she appears, going about. We are intelligent, imaginative beings who perceive the invisible, after all. The stories that hold up our self-esteem are not directly seen.

Perhaps this is why makeup-wear can impact the psychological state of individuals independently of an actual audience. Consider the confidence boost human beings can derive from cosmetics. Confidence can, in turn, improve performance, potentially generating a virtuous loop. In one study from 2016, participants who were instructed to apply makeup performed better on a test than participants who listened to positive music or applied face paint. The mechanism, presumably, is that makeup increases global self-esteem, and global self-esteem improves performance.

This might seem simple enough, but I’d like to invite a socially-aware analysis. Why should applying makeup, which is known to be temporary, improve global self-esteem? The makeup is, quite literally, skin deep. There is no direct causal pathway for the makeup to change anything about the personality or the intellect. The explanation, then, likely hinges on the envisioned, internal gaze. For at least some percentage of the population, global self-esteem seems to depend on how pleasing an individual imagines they look in the present moment.

If someone’s self-esteem did not rest on appearance at all — as the body neutrality movement advocates — potential mechanisms for increased confidence with makeup wear becomes somewhat scarce. Given this, I believe we should see the impacts of makeup on performance not as absolute but as socially contingent.

If women frequently equate their worth with their subjective degree of beauty, we should expect the confidence boost from makeup to be stronger. I do not wish to be reductive; bright red lipstick might signal boldness, and boldness might increase confidence. But it does seem as though the importance we place on beauty in women (arguably, a patriarchal construct) is a crucial step in the causal nexus that allows women to improve their academic performance via makeup wear.

Empowered or not, it’s an uncanny valley variant of bootstrapping. In a sense, it’s brilliant.

Intersubjectivity

Actual human beings are relevant, too. Suppose that makeup is successful. Suppose the changed likeness the makeup produces changes the impression of some secondary being; the makeup wearer is seen as more attractive, more trustworthy, more competent, more sociosexual, more prestigious (by men), more dominant (by women), less approachable, or more approachable than they otherwise would have been, depending on style. This does happen. In these cases, the makeup-wearer may be treated differently. This changed treatment may alter the makeup-wearer’s experience of life.

In this sense, dressing for the perception of others can be for oneself, nontrivially. Someone who is frequently approached might gain more social experience, for example. Appearance can influence income, income can alter personality, etc. It is sad that qualities like weight, appearance, gender, and race can impact employment or social outcomes; this goes against meritocratic ideals. But, in practice, they tend to.

This is where intersubjectivity comes in. When people — men, women, folks of all kinds — wear makeup, I argue it’s almost never true that they do it entirely for themselves or entirely for some other. When a person is perceived differently, for any reason, it tends to impact that person’s direct experience of life. We do not navigate a fixed, perception-devoid space. Rather, we navigate the variable, perception-sensitive world of other human beings. We point, we speak, we label, and continually see differently due to each other.

Clothing and makeup can become a kind of language. In Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes, Shahidha Bari discusses the poetics of clothes. Purses hold mystery. Dresses both reveal and contain, selectively. Jackets carry indicators of socioeconomic position.

Similar commentary can be made of various makeup styles. Blue lipstick signals a willingness to be unconventional. Pink might evoke gentleness, and orange, happiness. In Ancient Egypt, a clean, black cat-eye indicated status on both men and women. In many cultures, specific tribal markers show group belonging. Among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists, a red dot between the eyebrows on the forehead — called a Bindi — represents the universe, among a complex matrix of other things.

The history of makeup demonstrates its seeming inconsistency. Consistently, it’s biologically-inspired. At the same time, it’s socially constructed, utterly.

Makeup is biologically-inspired in the sense that the most common makeup emphasizes female secondary sex characteristics: higher contrast between skin and eyes, fatter lips, etc. This exaggeration of biological traits underpins the effectiveness of practices like applying lipstick and mascara. Higher facial contrast, which standard makeup provides, is associated with youth. Increased contrast is extreme in traditional Geisha attire, in which dark red lipstick is applied over white face powder. To a less extreme degree, most makeup practices across cultures increase overall facial contrast, outline eyes, and emphasize lips.

At the same time, specific makeup styles are particular to an individual, culture, time, status, and place. We invent the makeup. Groups of people produce it. People teach it to each other. Whether and how it is worn varies by geographic region. Human beings use it — intentionally or otherwise— to signal status, personality, occupation, gender identity, and belief.

In the 1910s, suffragettes wore red lipstick as a sign of rebellion. At the time, red lips were deemed illicit and unladylike. Feminists used these pre-existent connotations to engineer a new meaning.

Nietzsche, Butler, and Performativity

The idea of makeup soaks into our concepts of gender — and not always for good. Some misogynists see the likes of makeup and seem to not distinguish between pieces of attire and the human beings who wear them. They call women “shallow” and “manipulative.” This complaint is not new. Famously, Friedrich Nietzsche published the following passage in Beyond Good and Evil, among many other, similar quips:

What is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth — her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty.

As a thinker, I quite like Nietzsche. But, unfortunately, our beloved friend Friedrich appears to hate women. He has quite a few brethren in this sentiment. Aristotle called women passive. Kant believed women were driven by a “beautiful understanding.” I’m sure men on the internet express similar sentiments in the modern day.

There is a sense in which they are right. As Judith Butler famously argued, gender itself is constituted by habitual and socially constrained performativity. By Butler, daily makeup doesn’t merely express gender; it is part of what it means to enact gender, which they deem to be a thing that is done rather than a state of being. At the current time, I don’t fully endorse their theory. But in the least, gender has performative components. The act of repeatedly applying lipstick may generate identity, even as it expresses it, from how the habit of self is altered by the lipstick’s influence on social perception and treatment.

Social perception and self concept are deeply entwined. A prevalent kind of relation between the two involves the social categories we imagine ourselves and others to belong within: mother, father, woman, man, friend, employee, boss, etc. Among many other things, the concept of womanhood is associated with aesthetic performance. Sadly, time taken engaging in aesthetic performance is time not taken engaging in other pursuits. Less time commitment can amount to a genuine diminishment of capacity.

This is what Nietzsche was likely responding to. He saw the performance. He didn’t appreciate the circumstance. He didn’t see how the women he saw were acting in response to punishments and rewards from their social world, as does everyone.

Concluding Thoughts

We find ourselves with a somewhat sour picture. There is genuine incentive for women to engage in time-consuming aesthetic practices for varying types of social gain. But when individuals act on these incentives, they risk condemnations of frivolity from those who have not noticed that the shallow and the deep are impossible to unlace. The skin-deep is absorbed, and the internal creeps into surface-level expression, not unlike the twin sides of a Möbius strip.

I’m not saying anything particularly new. It’s the classic “damned if you do damned if you don’t” double-whammy feminists are quite familiar with. It’s sad, possibly oppressive, and also lovely, in the sense that things which might have been originally used to amplify biological signals can be hijacked by individuals to express their particularity. Recall the feminist use of red lipstick, and the deep religious connotations of the Bindi.

In many cases, the positive and negative valences present in aspects of a system do not cancel out. I take the system of beauty labor to be one such situation, and so lack a bold moral thesis.

But actions can indicate attitude, and I admit I’ve started to wear a little bit of makeup, occasionally. It’s not a solitary behavior. It’s a kind of advertising, which, in my case, signals: “I’m willing to be noticed, I’m willing to be observed, I’m willing to be seen, and you might know me.”

Sexual empowerment sounds nice. But with high rates of sexual assault, chronic bias against promiscuous women, a striking lack of mutual kindness in sexual culture, America’s Puritan roots, and patriarchal aims subverting good-faith attempts at honest sexual expression, it isn’t easy.

It isn’t even clear what sexual empowerment entails. Choice-based feminists might endorse OnlyFans, power-based kink, or dressing in a way that appeals to the so-called male gaze “for themselves.” Others—not so much. They question what it means to make choices in a world that only truly rewards a limited array of female expressions.

Thus, I ask: when are actions women attempt to take for themselves subverted to support purely male agendas? When, if ever, is choice genuine? When we seek sexual freedom, what is really being sought?

Embodied Feeling

When Lily Phillips slept with 100 men in a day, I was struck by the black-and-whiteness of the response. When she broke down in tears after-the-fact, most said, “of course.” Few people seemed to see her as an intelligent person who might have informative insight about her own experience. Still, at the end of Josh Pieters’ documentary focusing on her exploit, she said the following, disjointedly: “I think sometimes… I [was] feeling so robotic… by the 30th [person]… I’ve got a routine of how we’re going to do this… sometimes you dissociate… it’s not like normal sex at all.”

To act without feeling, dissociated from oneself—I suspect this is the source of quite a lot of sexual despair. Not sleeping with five men, or one-hundred (albeit, embodiment and mutual recognition may be more challenging under tight time constraints or gang-bang-esque arrangements).

In “The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde spoke about this beautifully. “To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us.” This—the pornographic—is put in contrast with the erotic. Lorde calls the erotic, “…a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” She elaborates:

“…the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness.”

In summary: if we know the joy our bodies are capable of, we can seek it out in all areas of life. This drives us, she argues, to expressions that challenge patriarchal norms. When we attend to what is bountiful for us, in a deep, embodied sense, we no longer tolerate the unacceptable. We become braver. This is a kind of power, both within the erotic, and on its account. “Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So, we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex,” Lorde adds. When the erotic is deemed trivial or relegated to the bedroom only, under darkness, we lose our potency.

Choice does not always involve going towards something from this sense of acknowledged feeling and embodied integrity. Sometimes, people make politically or economically coerced choices under hard circumstances—I don’t wish to deny these choices are a kind of choice. Nevertheless, a more substantial sense of empowerment likely comes when we are able to make choices that arise from the core of our beings, rather than mere survival—from what Lorde calls the erotic. The poet concludes:

“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”

Female Bodies

Sadly, most representations of “sexual empowerment” in the media do not include reference to a deep sense of embodied integrity.

Consider, for a moment, the beautiful onomatopoeia, “WAP.” Within the pop hit, Cardi B and Megan The Stallion express desire, which puts it above many depictions of female sexuality. Perhaps they state things they genuinely want. Perhaps they state things it would be marketable to want. Perhaps the pressures of marketability shift their genuine desires. In any case, they also brag about their desirability within our white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy:

“He bought a phone just for pictures of this wet ass pussy / Pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet ass pussy.”

To desire and to be deemed desirable are not the same things, but under the umbrella of “female sexual expression,” these two things are often equated. Women are taken to express their sexuality when they show their body, even though the appearance of someone’s body might have little to do with their felt sense of want. In WAP’s music video, the camera traces the singers’ bodies. It does not show the shape of their desire.

In other words, female desire is talked about, but attractive female bodies are shown. Both the desire and the bodies are depicted, unambiguously, as something that might serve men.

There is nothing wrong with men being the beneficiaries of female sexuality. In an ideal world, everyone would be a beneficiary. I only mean to note that we chronically confuse exposing the female body with showing sexuality itself, as if the appearance of bodies has some objective magnetic pull, or some kind of intrinsic meaning. It does not. To show the desire of a woman might instead involve showing what she desires. Perhaps that thing would be the body of a man. Such inner sense could be conveyed through poetry, literature—and it has been.

Anaïs Nin wrote erotica—some of which involved women who gaze voyeuristically at men. In the short story “Marianne,” a young studio artist encounters a man who is aroused only by receiving physical admiration. As Marianne paints his form, she gains a frustrated kind of satisfaction from bestowing this admiration. Afterwards, she confesses:

“I looked at my drawings, and to one of them I added the complete image of the incident. I was actually tormented with desire. But a man like that, he is only interested in my looking at him.”

This surprised me—within pornography, female voyeurism is a rare motif. But why is it rare? How could we be so chronically blind to what it might mean to show female desire or attraction, even within feminist circles?

My unsubstantiated sense is that women still need desirability to express desire, with a passing level of acceptability. Women deemed beautiful are punished for their expressions, and women deemed un-beautiful are punished all the more (possibly through sexual violence, or the threat of it). I hardly ever hear from women deemed un-beautiful, about their desire, in the public arena. This is a shame, since desire is a crucial part of being a person, rather than a thing.

In “On Having No Head,” D.E. Harding describes what it is like to live fully in one’s sensory experience without projecting the narrative of selfhood—history, appearance, abstract traits—onto oneself. People cannot see, from their own eyes, that they have heads. In some ways, this seems the preferred way of experiencing eroticism: facelessly. Sex, from this perspective, is not a way to validate beauty, but to destroy it, to forget how you seem, completely. To eliminate the invisible camera you put on yourself as you walk down the street, and to instead look out at the trees.

Power-to and Freedom-from

I’ve discussed Lily Phillips, Audre Lorde’s sense of the erotic, WAP, female voyeurism, and what it might mean to show genuine female desire rather than merely female form. Women might find humanity in celebrating their own subjectivity, their own joy, their own pleasure.

None of this answers my original question about empowerment. Naturally, empowerment ought to mean to come into power or to be granted power. But power is a bewildering business. When we say, “women should be sexually empowered,” we generally don’t imagine the impossibility of absolute power—we don’t imagine women who control the weather, or the stars, or who can shape-shift at will. Instead, we imagine something much more limited.

In “Rethinking Power” (1998), the philosopher Amy Allen usefully distinguishes between power-to and power-over. Power-to is the capacity for an agent to complete an end. Power-over is the ability of an agent to alter another body—another person, environment, structure, institution, or the self, I might add (though Allen does not). To this roster, freedom-from, or the tendency for one’s actions to not be unwillfully manipulated by a specific external agent or structure, is a natural inverse.

As Allen points out, concepts like power-to and power-over intersect in practice. They express relations rather than absolute states. To have the power-to for toast-making, I must have power-over the toaster, the bread, my hands, the air around my body, etc. Nevertheless, I find Allen’s taxonomy allows for more easeful distinctions.

I do not reckon it is possible to have complete freedom-from the cultural forces we find ourselves in, for example. People view promiscuity negatively, and this will impact what someone is able to disclose while receiving acceptance in certain forms of employment or neighborhood barbecues. I can’t imagine that away—nor can any other single individual.

As a general thing, human beings require a cultural backdrop to develop. The notion of a baby who grows up both unwounded and unenabled by “society,” in a perfect “natural” state, is an impossible dream. Who we are—who we really are, how our authentic desires formed in the first place—was built on our history, a history that touches inequality, and structural limitation from innumerable angles, over time. History leaks in through genes, through chemicals in the womb, through what we see. There is no neutral default. There is no ultimate escape.

Preliminary Conclusion

I do not wish to pretend that individuals can simply opt for full empowerment, as pop feminism sometimes slips into. Yet, within cultural restrictions, there are choices, or ways in which power-to is available. I can go to the local coffee shop, or not. I can choose substantial aspects of my own diet. I can look at this, or that—I can alter the direction of my own gaze. I can talk, and people may or may not give a shit. I can fuck, or not.

The range of power-to depends on the individual, but it is always present to at least a limited extent. This is where embodiment returns. We can use whatever power-to is available to us for actions that are, as much as possible, grounded in erotic integrity. With difficulty, we can choose to prioritize our own direct experience over sexual self-objectification, and to make choices from this centered place—or, we can try, at least. This is the kind of sexual empowerment available to the individual, or what we ought to mean when we talk about a “sexually empowered woman.”

However—this empowerment is limited by both the physical world and culturally coercive forces. I cannot leap to the moon, and many women are sadly in conditions in which either the use or the restraint of their sexuality is required for a basic standard of living. Consider many sex workers, women who rely on their husbands for sustenance, and those deeply embedded in religious institutions. Under the lens of freedom-from, these conditions do not exemplify the social condition of empowerment.

In any case: perfection is impossible, but perfection is not required for “much better.” There is no particular set of behaviors it is sensible to call “empowered”—instead, what seems to matter is both the embodied integrity of a choice, and the degree to which that choice is coerced by limiting conditions.

So, dance to WAP, if you want to. Use power-based kink influenced by hundreds of years of patriarchal control, if it helps you to find your sense of subjectivity and genuine eroticism. Alternatively—don’t.

The world is inescapable, but perhaps you can live in it.