Credit: Barbara Kruger; Source: http://templeofhera.blogspot.com/2009/02/your-body-is-battleground.html

Many women are feminists. Most people have several feminist friends. For readers of this site, perhaps the vast majority of your friends are feminist. I probably know at least a dozen women who would self-identify as feminist. Yet, I don’t know a single one who doesn’t, at least sometimes, wear make-up. I suspect all of them shave their legs. Many, on occasion, wear high heels. They believe, sometimes stridently, in the social construction of gender—that there is no biologically determined reason for women to care more about their appearance than men. They probably, like I, loathe women’s (and men’s) magazines, support a ban on beauty product advertising and plastic surgery and believe that men and women should be subject to the same social standards. They recognize and deplore the message it sends to society that women have to physically alter their appearance in order to impress men (and other women), believe that it strips them of social agency, implies their worth is limited to the physical, and suggests that they should wait placidly for male attention. Collectively, they believe make-up is bad for women and society. Individually, they wear make-up.

This is not irrational. The imperative to wear make-up is what is known in economics as a collective action problem. Society is structured in such a way that social rewards accrue to those that conform to the roles expected of them. Most men are more attracted to women wearing make-up and high heels. Even many of those males who are avowedly feminist. Most men would find it peculiar and discomforting to realize that their girlfriend didn’t shave her legs, even though they themselves would never dream of such a practice. Employers might be less likely to offer jobs to women who “ignored their appearance” or dressed in a very atypical way. Judgemental people might casually start referring to such women as “weird”. Some might be less inclined to be friends with them. Who would bear these costs? Who would even risk them? I know I wouldn’t. Of course, some women do; they’re, to my mind, exceptionally brave and strong—they bear social costs, and sometimes are even so wilful and cool that they change the minds of those around them. But they are very much in the minority. Most women, quite rationally and reasonably, socially conform. Yet every time a woman conforms she re-enforces the social norm. She makes it stronger and harder for other women to resist. Individual rationality necessitates collective harm. If everyone could act collectively they could break these social norms. But any particular individual acting alone will have no effect. Just because a few “outsiders” ignore social rules doesn’t destroy or even weaken those rules. Ironically, it may even strengthen them by providing a public example of the costs of non-conformity. In economics, collective action failures require government intervention to solve. This comes with its own set of problems. How much do we trust governments to restrict the right things? What message does it send for the state to correct “women’s collective irrationality”? Is freedom too important a value to curb, especially when the harms are so difficult to measure?

What happens to collective action problems that are not solved by the government? In these situations, the only solution is for individual to make individually irrational choices, in the hope that every other individual also makes this choice. Sometimes this is successful. For example, it is individually irrational to vote in an election (since almost never is an election swung by your vote) but most people still do and the collective harm is avoided. But, in that example, unlike in the case of make-up, the costs of unilateral action are relatively low—a few hours at the voting booth. When the costs are higher, most people fail to act. Climate change and vegetarianism are perhaps the two best analogies to the make-up problem. With climate change, each individual would be harmed by restricting their carbon output but their sacrifice would have a negligible effect on society. Similarly, people who don’t eat meat have almost no effect on the meat industry, yet collectively the meat industry wouldn’t exist if each of those individuals didn’t eat meat.

Yet, although neither climate change reduction nor vegetarianism are social movements that have been entirely successful, far more people adhere to self-enforced rules in those situations than they do with make-up. Why? I suspect it is because people have convinced themselves that each individual instance of riding a plane or eating a steak is, in itself, immoral. This implicates a separate question: the morality of wearing make-up as disconnected from its rationality. This question turns on the distinction between causal responsibility and causal contribution. To take an example: an innocent individual is in front of a firing squad of forty people; each bullet will hit the individual simultaneously and one bullet is enough to kill the person. No one in the firing squad is causally responsible, since if that person did not shoot, the victim would still die. But each person causally contributes, by being 1/40^th the cause of the person’s death. Most people, I think, would say that each individual in the firing squad was doing something immoral. Much like, if animals have rights, those of us who eat meat are doing something immoral, and, if the planet is in danger, those of us who ride planes are doing something immoral. On this view, each individual act of wearing make-up is immoral, even if it doesn’t lead to negative consequences.

However, I suspect vegetarians and environmentalists get an easier ride than those who reject make-up. A culture which cultivates a female appearance obsession is pervasive across economic and social life, and the costs of rejecting it are considerably higher than having to eat lentils or not driving as much.

So, how do we solve the collective action problem of social conformity? Either we trust governments to intervene in our personal lives or we use the moral autonomy granted to us by those governments to make hard personal choices. There is, of course, no easy answer. But, it might be time to start asking the question.

Samir Deger-Sen is a D. Phil. student in International Relations at Balliol College. He has been part of the competitive debating circuit for 8 years and, in 2008, won the World Universities Debating Championship. Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’ was the first book that he read about feminism.