hah [pause] hah

A minimal understanding of feminism can get you quite a long way, but - as in the case of The Telegraph's Michael Deacon - not quite far enough. Deacon can't quite see why a feminist might have a problem with page 3-lite without falling prey to hypocrisy:

The conundrum is this. Feminists believe, quite rightly, that women should be free, as men are, to make their own choices about what they do in life.

So what about women who choose to pose for photographs without terribly many clothes on? They aren’t being forced to do it. They’ve elected to do it, independently, for their own reasons, whatever they may be.

Should they stop, purely because someone else thinks it’s an activity unsuitable for a woman?

If it’s unacceptable for a man to tell women how and how not to live their lives, isn’t it a bit off for a women’s officer to do the same?

There's no flaw in feminism here, just a flawed understanding of how feminism might operate. For example, feminism does not offer carte blanche to any and all behaviour simply because it happens to have been carried out by a woman and can therefore be minimally described as liberational. Why might a women's officer - or indeed anyone - criticise another woman's choices?

Perhaps because - as the women's officer concerned, Natalie Szarek, pointed out - that certain images reproduce and reinforce harmful attitudes towards women, and that women (and men) might just collectively owe a small debt to each other not to help support or propagate those attitudes, particularly in a society which already has spectacularly fucked up attitudes towards women's bodies. To argue that none of the models involved had been "exploited" is to almost completely miss the point.

This is, incidentally, the same argument raised in criticism of raunch culture, which - last time it raised its head - inspired letters that read like this:

If you want to be a feminist, you need to take heed of other women - in this country and elsewhere - whose circumstances may be radically different to your own. Some women may choose to embrace so-called raunch culture; that's their prerogative - it's a simple matter of civil liberties. But don't try and suggest this is, in itself, feminist. Don't pretend it empowers other women. Don't pretend it advances anyone's interests except their own.

So when Deacon writes

here’s a conundrum that I don’t think feminists have ever satisfactorily answered. Or if they have, I wasn’t listening, being a man and all.

you can enjoy a few moments of cold, shallow laughter.