“

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of
herself. ” The male response to the woman who is madeup
and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions.
One need only refer to the male idealization of
the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating
here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority
based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced
inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women
and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these
oppressive grooming imperatives.
The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos
surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation
(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom
of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the
relationship between women and their bodies. The
body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint
and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop
mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps
the notion of beauty which will then organically
emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a
respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable,
variety
“ – Andrea Dworkin

For most of human history in most societies, men did as much beauty labor as women and often more.  Girdles and makeup were for both men and women.  Look at most of fucking history, everybody fucking wore fucking makeup and did their fucking hair.  Modern dudes are a weird lazy shitty exception.

Not to mention the CONSTANT criticism of women who look “unnatural” or who are “deceptive”.  Plastic surgery, makeup, all these things are things men want made invisible, a perfection that does not show the labor involved (yet another case of men insisting on women’s labor not being labor) and appears to have occurred naturally, so men don’t have to think about the work involved, in fact many men believe makeup is deceptive and should be abolished so that we can be graded like livestock.

Refusing to regard it as productive labor (and part of humanity, because we ALL FUCKING ADORN OURSELVES) obscures the fact that as with emotional labor women are performing a socially necessary function that men do not do their fair share of, while men insist that women hide the fact that his labor exists/is laboe