Arifa Akbar: Don’t listen to the lipstick feminists

Published: Sunday, August 21, 2011

I remember going to the launch of one of Shere Hite's sex surveys which focused on female desire, and being stunned not by what she said but by how she looked. She was heavily made-up and wore a spray-on dress with precipitous heels. It looked like a book launch that could burst into burlesque at any moment. I was studying French feminism at the time and had tortured debates on whether Hite was a lipstick feminist or if she was cleverly illustrating Simone de Beauvoir's theory that femininity was a performance.

Reading Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, this week, I was reminded of that moment. She is an academic at the LSE who advocates that women use their sexiness strategically at work and in their relationships, as it is their unique advantage over men (who, she suggests, are hungrier for sex than women).

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