QUOTE : The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less. But then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful - even in situations like this, in which women's choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not "make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative". The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women's choices - not just our problems - are, in the end, political, has led to a vision of "women's empowerment" that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.