Twisty is back:

I allude to the confident, photogenic, entirely fictitious female who inhabits TV ads, “Sex in the City,” Oprah, and the popular imagination. Today’s woman isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t need to be, because she’s empowered.

She may only earn 3/4 of what a man earns, but she damn well has the empower to look sexy doing it in her cheapcrap push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret. She has the empower to demand pink products from manufacturers. She has the empower to cry out ‘I did it for me!’ when she gets her boob job; maybe she even has the empower to believe it. The empowerful woman is saucy, yet feminine. Clever, yet feminine. In her early thirties, yet feminine. Heterosexual, yet feminine. Stays in shape eating Lean Cuisine and sweating blue Gatorade while kickboxing in slow motion, yet feminine. Yes, the empowerful woman is many things. Too bad powerful isn’t one of them. That’s because feminine is all of them.

This is why I always crook a suspicious eyebrow at stuff that looks exactly like the old construct of feminity(and yes, the whore is part of that. You can't have the Madonna without the whore) but mysteriously is supposed to be different because of some reason or the other. The truth is that a lot of ideas that were revolutionary in the past have been coopted in the media. (feeling a new freedom from women's lib? try new freedom maxi pads.)

The idea of women's choices seems to only apply to a woman's choice to be sexual in the quest for the almighty dollar or to make the choice to wear exactly what everyone else wears(the world shudders with the blow for feminism I struck by getting a pair of kitten heel shoes for $5 at Payless) . Now, if a woman wants to choose not to have a baby, to love women in a real way, not staged for some man's titilation, to stand up for themselves, to have ones own sexuality, to wear shoes that aren't patently ridiculous the folks who are for your choice to be the Walmart version of a Playboy playmate are all nark, you sexually repressed feminazi.

This reminds me of an article about the Tip Drill protest:

I also do not wish to demonize the women who participate in the videos and who feel the tug of the capitalist puppet strings and see this as an easy way to make money. Our criticism was directed toward Nelly, not the women in his videos, but I do hope to help them see that while they may feel autonomous in the choices they make, the implication of their decisions are global, impacting how African-American women are viewed world wide.

People can criticize the results of people's choices without attacking them. It is not true that feminism is everything a woman does. It's a large ideology comprising many sometimes contradictory elements, but the truth of the matter is that some stuff is just for fun or what you do in your personal life. When I make jewelry, that's not a feminist act. It's just me making pretty sparkles. And I can be fine with that.