• it’s bullshit disingenuous rejection of responsibility for patriarchal beauty standards
• it hides yet another performance standard: never let us SEE what we are doing to you
• it shows contempt for effort. people are not supposed to try at anything, you’re supposed to be a gifted special snowflake
• and admitting that femininity is effort means fundamentally undercutting the idea that women are flighty and trivial and weak
• and it makes - OF COURSE - the whole thing about dude’s boners, and not the way there are social and financial consequences for not being a little made-up
• and it is so hostile to the idea of self-expression? someone who wears bright red lipstick does not think that people will actually assume their lips REALLY ARE bright red, any more than we assume a dude who shaves his face is naturally hairless, or think that a person wearing a blue shirt actually has blue arms. sometimes we make aesthetic choices to communicate with the world.
• which in and of itself depends on women as fundamentally underhanded. of course even the way we present ourselves is a bald-faced lie

basically it is a Gross Things About The Patriarchy 101 midterm all rolled up into one passive-aggressive bid for a pat on the back over some Nice Guy’s “enlightenment”