Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random. This is a notion often ascribed to a type of feminism, be it neoliberal feminism, marketplace feminism, or consumption feminism. But well-meaning white women also need me to believe because accessing beauty is about the totalizing construct of gender, in this case femininity, in a world where other forms of lifestyle consumption are splintering.