When they cater for women, even the menu is misogynist

While the women’s magazine dieting tips of the past are now considered inappropriate, with modern discussions focusing on health, the reality has not changed. In fact, you could say it’s become worse: we’re no longer allowed to admit that we’re hungering to fit a social ideal.

But beauty has become the modern woman’s second or third job, an addition to career and children. While using her brain to climb the corporate ladder, she starves it to fit the corporate template. Long hours at the office add to hours of grooming in the mornings and on weekends. Fitness might be health and me-time, but it is also an economic necessity.

Meanwhile, fun is put on hold because fun things are often fattening. Just like Ginger Rogers, who executed complex cinematic dance routines with Fred Astaire – but backwards and in heels – career women are doing everything men do plus extra hours, on a diet. To add insult to injury, like the housewives of old who were advised to make themselves fresh to greet their husbands after a day of hard work around the house, the modern career woman pretends to her female peers that her figure comes naturally, lest she be judged as a bad feminist for her vanity.

Highly successful men sometimes cultivate a scruffy look as a kind of flex – they are so powerful, they can look like hobos and be considered rakish. But if a woman were to neglect all that “vain” maintenance, she would also be judged unkempt and uncorporate. And women notice that more than men. Of course, it’s also frowned upon to be too well turned out – what a show pony! If she doesn’t get Botox, she’s judged for looking old; if she does, and it shows, she’s judged for that.

All this from a piece of fish? Damn right. The moment the organisers chose that measly menu they were unwittingly part of this chain of women making decisions and judgments that restrict each other’s choices.

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It judges those who work “too much” while raising children, or those who choose to take time out to raise children because, in the words of this year’s Women’s Budget Statementthis limits their “scope for greater participation in the paid labour force and in leadership roles”. It condemns women for the jobs they choose (caring roles are, it seems, too gender-conforming) but also for leading with the same toughness that a man in the same position uses to cut his path.

That fish was feminism stuck in an unhelpful paradigm. My table decided it was time to go look for red meat. If that’s the patriarchy, we’ll make a meal of it, rather than grow feeble on matriarchal menu misogyny.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.