Feminism against Jennifer Love Hewitt

Feminists blame "body shaming" on the patriarchy, but a more plausible cause is feminism itself.

Written by Bo Winegard

Blame feminism.

After photos circulated of Jennifer Love Hewitt walking the red carpet in a black dress with spaghetti straps, boorish discourse ensued. Hewitt, once a young, sultry actress, now appeared a plumper adult. A mother. More mature and wiser, but also less alluring to those who had admired her as a teenager. To many of them, she had committed the sin of being a finite human and not some timeless work of art.

Jejune jokes and belittling comments about her weight filled the comment sections beneath tweets of her photographs.

Many opined that these crude comments and attacks on Hewitt were the inevitable work of patriarchy, of men dominating and humiliating women by holding them to impossible ideals. These patriarchs, we are told, sexualize girls, then scorn them for aging. They dehumanize, reducing the vast subjectivity of a woman to a fleshy body—a mere ornament to be ogled.

This is what we might call the feminist thesis of discourse about women. The feminist thesis claims that impossible standards of beauty are weapons of male control, used to denigrate and subjugate. This thesis is widely promoted, especially among educated elites, but it is implausible.

The explanation is too simple, too ideologically convenient. A more plausible account must look not to patriarchy, but to two broader, interrelated social trends. First, the second and third feminist revolutions, which emphasized sexual liberation, have exacerbated intrasexual competition among women, where sexual allure becomes a primary instrument for securing status and desirability. Second, these same feminist revolutions have dismantled the reverence for motherhood that once dignified maternal bodies and honored aging women for their roles as caretakers of children and custodians of a civilization’s moral memory.

The result is a society in which women are no longer respected for maternal dignity, for gaining weight or aging naturally. Instead, they are compelled to remain sexually alluring as long as possible, using cosmetics, fitness regimens, and eventually surgery in a vain battle against time itself. Competition for youth, thinness, and sexual capital is more intense than ever. The sanctity of motherhood is no longer honored but dismissed as an antiquated norm, a holdover or vestigial organ to be removed or transcended, but certainly not celebrated.

Not only is the feminist thesis wrong, it is the opposite of the truth. It is feminism, not patriarchy, that has given rise to the impossible ideals now tormenting ordinary and famous women alike. It is feminism that encourages the barbs that sting aging women with maternal bodies. It is feminism that has vitiated the power of the wise, dignified woman, trading it for the fleeting currency of sexual capital.

In many traditional (that is, patriarchal) societies, motherhood, and the plump body that often accompanied it, conferred dignity, not derision. The aging female body, marked by the strains of pregnancy and the labors of childcare, was not treated as an undesirable sexual body but was lifted above sexuality altogether.

The Roman matrona exemplified chastity and exercised moral authority, robed in a stola and often commanding the household (domus). She did not compete with younger women for sexual allure; she guided the moral development of her children, inculcating Roman virtues and the ways of the ancestors (mos maiorem). The Victorian “angel in the house” likewise was not a seductress, but a sanctified presence whose maternal role eclipsed the fleeting intrigues of romantic dalliance. Religious iconography reinforces this elevation of motherhood across Western civilization, celebrating Mary and other saints for their uniquely feminine contributions to life. They were depicted not as sexual, but as motherly beauties. Plump, reserved, life-bearing beings.

The cultural reverence for motherhood did not survive the feminist revolutions of the twentieth century. Many feminists rejected the maternal ideal, the “angel in the house,” as repressive, claiming it was a role devised by men to confine women to domestic servitude. In its place, they celebrated the image of the liberated, “autonomous” woman, sexually expressive, economically independent, and freed from the burdens of biology. Feminism rejoiced in the ruin of the sanctified mother and matron.

But in shattering what they called the tyranny of motherhood, feminists also destroyed its public dignity. What was once considered the culmination of feminine virtue, the highest expression of woman’s life-bearing gift, became simply a degraded body, a ruined, sagging, and scarred body desperately competing against younger, firmer, more nubile bodies. And the older woman, once celebrated as a matriarch, was now expected to maintain sexual relevance or risk obsolescence. Women fled the putative prison of motherhood only to enter the harsher incarceration of constant sexual competition.

The intensity of female sexual competition cannot be explained solely by reference to male preferences or desires. The feminist errs profoundly in dividing the world into men and women, oppressors and oppressed. Women do not, in fact, share many interests and often have more in common with men than with one another. They are not comrades. They are rivals. If homo homini lupus est, then femina feminae vulpes est. Woman is a fox to woman, cunning and covert in her competition.

As the status of motherhood declines and the number of sexually liberated competitors increases, the pressure intensifies. Women’s competition is often indirect and psychological rather than physical. They disparage one another’s bodies, mocking flab, scars, wrinkles, not always to please men, but to wound rivals. The goal is twofold. To diminish the other’s sexual status and to erode her confidence. A woman who is timid, insecure, and ashamed is far easier to surpass. She is less of a threat. Indeed, a cynic or a realist might contend that feminism itself is a tactic of intrasexual competition.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is, by any reasonable measure, a perfectly beautiful middle-aged woman with three children. The idea that she should still resemble a seductive teenager is not only bizarre, but also sinister. That many would mock her for looking precisely as she ought to look, i.e., a mother, is deeply lamentable. But to claim that the proximate cause of such uncouth mockery is patriarchy is absurd. Traditionalism, whatever its faults, reveres the maternal and discourages ferocious intrasexual competition among women.

No, the real source of this cruelty, beyond the ordinary pettiness of human nature, is feminism itself and its long war against the so-called tyranny of motherhood. In the name of liberation, feminism has intensified sexual competition and degraded the mother and the matron. It has encouraged a desperate quest for the fountain of youth, not in the New World, but in the scalpel of the plastic surgeon.

Bo Winegard is an editor of Aporia.

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